When World Tea News asked me a few weeks ago to write a regular blog, I thought “How wonderful! I can write about some of my recent adventures in various parts of the world and share some of the tea stories, facts, places, and manufacturing details I’ve discovered during some of those trips,”  So, this first blog follows a week I spent in Taiwan earlier in April with some of the tea farmers, wholesale merchants and retailers in different parts of the island.

My trip was organized by Jackson Huang, a tea merchant for many years and a key player in Taiwan’s tea world. Jackson knows all there is to know about Taiwanese tea and he also knows most of the people involved in manufacturing and selling it, and he taught me so much as we traveled around.

After a night’s rest in Taipei, we headed off on the new bullet train to Wu Zu in Taiching County and from there drove up into the Sung Bo area of Nantou County, where pretty much all the tea is harvested by machine.  Interestingly, the farmers were about 10 days behind their usual schedule because the warmer spring weather had arrived much later than usual this year and the cooler temperatures had delayed the start of the first plucking round.  

Apart from very limited production of green and black teas, Taiwan now concentrates on making the fabulously fragrant semi-balled oolongs that are so popular amongst local consumers and which fetch very good prices.

We visited several farms to learn about the manufacturing techniques and of course, everywhere we went we were served little bowls of wonderful tea. Every house, office and shop is equipped with a large brewing table - often carved from a huge piece of wood that has been sliced straight from a tree trunk, and then crafted and polished so that all the knots and natural graining add to the beauty of the surface.  Little stools or chairs carved from the same wood are placed around the table and the farmer or merchant sits in the strategic brewing seat (sometime in a slightly higher chair that gives a sense that he is presiding over the ceremony - which indeed he is) and while chatting constantly to his visitors, he deftly (and almost intuitively) prepares the tea, gung-fu style, and the little porcelain bowls are generously filled and refilled until it is time to move on.

In retail stores, it is usually one of the shop assistant who takes charge of brewing, and it’s fascinating to watch each ‘tea master’ wash the pot and dainty bowls, measure the leaf, pour the water, instinctively wait for the correct number of seconds or minutes before pouring the sparkling golden liquor into a small jug and then filling the individual bowls.  The hands that brew perform their flawless choreography again and again, never making any false movement or forgetting any of the small traditional rituals, and all the while the constant conversation flows and guests sip contentedly.

I was at a linguistic disadvantage as I don’t speak Chinese but judging from the heated discussions and non-stop stream of chatter, the chaps were pretty preoccupied with crucial issues which (I was told) included tea prices, local tea competitions, the weather, new machinery, the latest technological advances and all sorts of other general issues.

Our travels took us onward from Nantou County up into to the high mountain areas of Meishan (Plum Mountain) and Alishan (Ali Mountain), to visit more farms where the teas are hand plucked from bushes that grow on really steep terraced slopes.  It’s beautiful up there amongst the mountain peaks where clouds often drift below you, filling the valleys, and the tea slopes rise as if from a sea of mist.  And everywhere we went, we were invited in to drink more wonderful tea. 

Back in Taipei, Jackson and I visited some of the merchants who sell the teas we had seen being made.  Some of them still have their shops in the oldest part of the town which grew up around the old port about 200 years ago when the first Chinese immigrants from Fujian province settled here.

Just a stone’s throw from the perimeter of the old Dadaocheng harbor, the old narrow streets now house fabric and clothing workshops but once upon a time, these were not roadways but canals and little boats delivered the chests of tea to the merchants’ stores.

We wandered past one very large, impressive house that is apparently still the home of the family that once traded tea there.  The man who built it, Lin Lan-Tien, is said to have moved his business here from the nearby Keelung seashore where pirates were a bit of a problem. The main entrance to the front of the house, like all the buildings in the street, is on a higher level than one would normally expect because of the risk of flooding when the street was a waterway.

Although most of the businesses that once thrived here have closed or moved to new bigger premises, most are not far away from this historic neighborhood.  It’s only a short walk from here to the offices of various tea associations, merchants’ stores and some very attractive tea stores of which more next time.

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