When Raymond Leung came to Australia, his first job was to design the interior of the Mandarin Club. Little did he know it was the start of a Chinese cultural renaissance.

We are one steep deep in a pot of sencha when Raymond Leung brings out the books. He has pulled stacks of them from a private area in the corner of his teahouse, Zensation, located in Sydney’s Waterloo, and piled them onto a bench beside me. The contents? A trove of photographs and paraphernalia, including posters, flyers and sketches, that would excite any inner historian.

Leung (pictured) arrived in Australia in 1973 to undertake a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Technology Sydney but ended up becoming an interior designer by happenstance when a commission to deck out the Mandarin Club – back then the only yum cha restaurant in town – required an oriental touch that drew on his experience as a display artist in Hong Kong. As staff from the club left to establish their own Chinese restaurants, Leung became the go-to man for their interiors too. (Lees Fortuna Court in Crows Nest still has some of his original work.)

Soon he had a sizeable portfolio that unfolded to other kinds of design work, including graphic design for events such as the Canton Fair, an early sign of NSW’s friendship with the province of Guangdong. He was also the vegetable carver for Ella-Mei Wong, whose The Commonsense Chinese Cookery Book (1977) pioneered Asian cuisine for Australian home chefs.

But Leung was not satisfied keeping all this small-scale. “In Australia, those days in the ‘70s, it was not quite Chinatown – only Dixon Street, which is part of Haymarket, and a few gambling dens. I felt that I could use my heritage to promote Chinese cultural things.”

In the mid-1980s, Leung was instrumental in starting the dragon boat race events at Birkenhead Point, then the city’s Chinese New Year (now Lunar New Year) parade with the support of then-Deputy Lord Mayor Henry Tsang, the first Asian to be elected to the City of Sydney council. Leung also designed the original Chinese zodiac lanterns for the first Moon Festival celebrations in Sydney.

When they all gained enough momentum to attract committees and funding, he stood down and opened the original Zensation Teahouse in Surry Hills in 2003. “Being Chinese, I wanted to promote the art of Chinese tea. Not just the food. Then it evolved from that,” Leung says of the impetus to focus on tea. “I want to project that tea is not just tea, but a lot more philosophical.”

As for what he drinks regularly? “I cannot start the day without a good tea. I prefer something with stronger tannins.”

This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 12 October 2023.