Last week, my wife and I drove to Pinglin (坪林), a small rural town half an hour southeast of Taipei City, in hot pursuit of nesting herons that she wanted to film. Knowing that it was also spring harvest time for tea, and that Pinglin is the heart of the baozhong growing region, I was more than happy to accompany her.
Walking around this quiet town on a weekday, I was amazed at just how many tea shops there were. Like, entire blocks that are just tea shops. And because many of them are run by tea growers themselves, a lot of the shops were busy doing the final drying stage for the leaves, i.e. loading it onto trays to be put into low-temperature ovens. And so the sweet perfumey aroma of fresh baozhong wafted through the air at every turn.
So the main tea on hand of course, is baozhong. The bluish green, light-roasted type that’s most popular nowadays is everywhere (and it smells heavenly). But there’s several different types of baozhong, which while not impossible to find elsewhere, are especially easy to find here. For instance, baozhong grown from different cultivars, produced with different levels of roast, roasted with charcoal or by machine. And then there’s aged baozhong, of which there is a ton. There’s plenty of other teas too, such as hongcha (especially mixiang hongcha), green tea, white tea, and oriental beauty. There’s bits of pu’er here and there too, though I didn’t see anything that really caught my eye.
So, to filter through all the shops here is a massive job. From a first glance you do get some idea though. Some are spacious with lots of tables and feel like they’re designed to host tour groups. Some are very manicured with fancy branded packaging. Some look like they’re just the front entryway of someone’s home, with a few random bags of tea lying around, and some old guys in the back watching TV and smoking cigarettes. There’s also wholesalers, where you’re basically walking into someone’s storeroom, full of massive bags of tea. I decided to check out one of these.
I didn’t really have a plan, except maybe to bring home some aged baozhong. So I wandered into the Shiang-Tai Tea Company (祥泰茶莊). It’s owned by the Feng family, who’ve been in the business since 1921. Turns out they are one of the major players in the Pinglin tea industry. They have a lot of tea, tons of it. The owners were happy to grab a handful of whatever I wanted to try from any of the huge wholesale bags littered across the room. One thing I really liked about this place, that’s different from many shops, is the sheer variety. For instance we started talking about Wuyi yancha, which one of the owners is particularly fond of, and he mentioned that he has several that are grown in Pinglin, and would I like to try?
I ended up sampling five teas. Competition style brewing, spooning from a gaiwan into a cup. The quality was quite good, though I suspect I didn’t ask the right questions, or make the right impression, to be offered up their very best stuff. I find this to be a pretty common issue as a foreigner going into a teashop, that the owners expect you to want cheaper tourist-type tea. It’s a tricky thing, because you don’t want to be rude or arrogant, and you also don’t want to set yourself up to be sold some cheap tea for highly inflated prices. I’m still figuring out how best to navigate this.
While there, I tried a Pinglin hongcha (pretty good but too light for my tastes), a medium-roast baozhong (I liked this but not enough to purchase), a 1980 aged baozhong (really liked this), and also two Wuyi yancha cultivars that were grown in Pinglin: a medium-roast Rougui and a charcoal heavy-roast Wuyi (the name of a yancha cultivar that’s been grown in Taiwan for some time; no one knows exactly what it is, so it’s just called Wuyi). These last two were both particularly interesting. While they had a lot of the broader characteristics of a yancha, the roasting style in particular struck me as something different.
While I only tried one aged baozhong, they did have quite a few more. A part of me would’ve been perfectly content to just sample a range of these, and not even bother with anything else. If I’d been really serious about buying tea on this trip, this kind of narrow focus would’ve been the way to go. I find most teashops in Taipei only have one or two aged baozhongs, so it’s pretty special to walk into a shop like this one.
I didn’t get around to much further exploring on this trip, but will be back. There’s a pretty famous tea museum here, for instance. There’s also a small but nice Old Street, with the typical array of restaurants, street food stalls, and shops (in this case almost entirely tea shops). But unlike most Old Streets in Taiwan, this one is pretty quiet, apparently even on weekends. Because many of the shop owners also grow tea, their shops may or may not be open on a given day. So the place feels pretty sleepy. It’s a nice contrast from the many overly crowded Old Streets around Taipei. And it’s only half an hour drive from the center of the city!
Leave a Reply