Flip through any travel guide, and you’ll inevitably see mention of Taipei’s jade market, on Jianguo Road. It’s packed on weekends and is impressive in size, but can leave you feeling numb after you’ve wandered row upon row of cluttered tables, enclosed in an oppressive parking garage lacking all natural light. For the tea obsessive though, perhaps its greatest flaw is that it’s so picked over — like shopping for antiques in NYC.
In my opinion Taichung offers some delightful alternatives. This past weekend, while visiting my wife’s relatives, I took the opportunity to hit up the Saturday Jade Market. It’s an open-air traditional market in Taichung’s Central District, the original downtown. There’s a more “lived-in” quality to this neighborhood. If you happen to make the trip, don’t be surprised if you encounter a few scantily clad ladies eying you as they lean against their motorbikes. At 11am.
The jade market has all the things you’d imagine — old coins, calligraphy scrolls, hand-carved woodworks, antique ceramics, jewelry, jade in every form imaginable, and lots of tea and teaware. It’s also significantly less crowded than the one in Taipei, and right away feels like a place where you might actually find something special.
By the way, there’s a lot of Taiwanese spoken here. You’ll do fine if you speak Mandarin, but you’ll do better if you speak Taiwanese. If you only speak English, then, well, good luck.
As I walked up, the first thing I saw were several stalls overflowing with Yixing-style teapots. I picked up a few to check them out, seemed like mostly cheap modern pots. A fair amount were obviously slipcast. It’s entirely possible there’s some treasures here, like Factory 1 or late Qing era pots, but you could spend hours just going through these. With other family engagements later in the day, this was not in the cards for me this time.
We continued on into the market. More of all of the above. You do start to feel pretty jaded (pun intended?) to it all after a while. There’s just a ton of repetition. And there’s this nagging feeling in the back of your mind that a lot of it might be junk. But maybe not? Which is exactly how, if you’re anything like me, you can spend all day at one of these places.
After a few more minutes, I noticed an older man off in a corner, hammering at a small anvil. He had a table in front of him laid out with tea scoops (茶則 or cha ze), clearly handmade from a wide range of metals — silver, steel, bronze, copper, and also some really pretty ones made from bamboo and other woods.
It turned out he was also a really charming guy. When he saw my daughter, his face lit up and he made her a collection of origami animals. He even took one of his polishing cloths and folded it into a doll for her to take home. And he did it all completely effortlessly. Such an artist, it was fun to watch him do his thing.
I’d been kinda wanting to find a nice tea scoop for my home tea setup, and pretty quickly I was sold on his work. I ended up purchasing one made with a nice dark wood, and he gifted me a silver tea needle as well. Any time I use this tea scoop, which is going to be pretty much every day, I’ll always remember our chance encounter. It makes it so much more meaningful.
After chatting for a bit (through my wife, as my Mandarin is still pretty pitiful), we had to be on our way. I didn’t get far with looking around for tea, but there was plenty of it. Being in Taichung, in close proximity to so many famous tea growing areas, there were vacuum-sealed bags of oolong everywhere. And also a fair amount of pu’er and other heicha, much of it barely labeled and looking like ‘90s or earlier. I tend to stay away from older tea in settings like this though. It just seems like most of it is pretty cheap stuff to begin with, and of questionable storage history (frequently on the wetter end of the spectrum). But maybe not? Maybe there’s some gems there. I’ll have to investigate more the next time I come back.
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