One of my favorite parts of living in Taiwan is going to teahouses. It’s a chance to slow down and unwind, and when on your own, for deeper introspection. Which is a rare luxury when you’re usually chasing around a toddler.
When you visit a teahouse here, it’s pretty much a given that the place will have wonderful ambiance. Many of them are in beautiful older buildings, frequently from the Japanese era. Some have excellent tea too, but there’s a wide range.
The other day I visited Laughtear Chinese Teahouse (悲歡歲月人文茶館), a small teahouse in Taichung’s West District. Being the old downtown, there’s a great sense of nostalgia here. This is in part due to the high number of well-preserved buildings from the Japanese era.
This teahouse is one example. It’s a Japanese style home, built in the 1920s by a Japanese university professor. It’s been well taken care of over the years, and became a teahouse in 1988.
The place is pretty small, feels like basically one big room, and can seat maybe five groups. The day we went, we were the only ones there, and it had the coziness of spending an afternoon in a friend’s living room.
When you enter, you’re asked to remove your shoes, as the floors are lined with tatami mats. There are Japanese-style tables where you sit on cushions on the floor, and also a few western-style tables with chairs. The ambiance and decor is beautiful. Lots of period details and cabinets filled with interesting teaware.
After you’ve been to a number of teahouses you start to see the variations in what kind of teaware they bring you. For instance, some give you very few tea making tools. Some give you beautiful older zisha teapots. One of my personal pet peeves, is that some teahouses give you cheap slipcast teapots, which don’t feel appropriate for good tea. I can understand the concern with visitors breaking expensive teaware, but still. On occasion I’ve even requested a different teapot, though it’s hard to do without being rude. This teahouse brought me one of these cheap slipcast pots, which was a bit disappointing considering you’re surrounded by beautiful teaware.
I drank a sheng pu’er from Yiwu that was supposedly 30-40 years old. It was loose tea, not compressed. It was good, not mind blowing, but certainly enjoyable. Especially in this setting. The tea had fairly clean storage for loose pu’er, nice body effects that got quite strong, and a good lingering salivating effect for several hours afterwards. Who produced this tea, or when, I’ll never know. It arrived in a small package with minimal source details.
This teahouse has a pretty limited tea menu, and rather little detail as to the provenance of the teas. They had one other pu’er, plus a few oolongs, some green tea, black tea, and a few herbal teas such as osmanthus. Some teahouses have a much wider and more detailed selection, which I do tend to prefer. But this one, with its wonderful ambiance, was a great place to spend an afternoon.
They also have food; you can even eat lunch here. Though I suspect most come for the tea. We ordered a few snacks and they were all quite good, better than expected even. While some teahouses (such as Wu Wei Tsao Tang, another teahouse in Taichung), are rather focused on meals, this one feels more about drinking tea, and creating a quiet meditative atmosphere for it.
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