Place · in Nantou
Mingjian
Mingjian is the township that quietly does the volume. It grows more tea than anywhere else in Taiwan, on low flat ground where machines can work, and most of what it makes ends up as the base of a cold drink rather than in a gaiwan. It is also the island's refining and trading floor, which is why it turns up in every argument about where Taiwanese tea actually comes from.
What grows here
Rolled oolong, made fast and in quantity. Si Ji Chun is the township's signature and most of Taiwan's Si Ji Chun comes from here: Mingjian is the island's largest single tea district, roughly 2,000 hectares turning out something like four tenths of the national crop, and it supplies the great bulk of the base leaf the drinks trade runs on. Jin Xuan and Cui Yu sit behind it. The local product has its own domestic name, Songbo Changqing, after Songboling, the plateau the gardens sit on. Very little of it is aimed at the connoisseur trade, and it is not pretending to be.
The ground
A low plateau rather than a mountain, gentle enough to drive a harvester across, which is the single fact that explains the township. Warm ground at this elevation flushes early and often, and it flushes evenly enough that a machine cutting a whole row at one height still takes usable leaf. Everything Taiwan sells about slow growth in the cold runs in reverse here, and the tea is priced accordingly.
The bushes
Si Ji Chun, four seasons of spring, is the plant and the business model at once: a natural hybrid found by chance in northern Taiwan and recognised in 1981, tough, adaptable, disease-resistant and good for five or six pickings a year. Its loud floral attack is a cultivar trait rather than a mark of quality, and it is worth learning to recognise so it does not read as character. Jin Xuan and Cui Yu fill the same role, chosen for yield and for taking machine picking without falling apart.
Harvest seasons
The earliest and the most frequent picking in Taiwan. Low ground here can be cut from February, weeks before a mountain garden has moved, and a Si Ji Chun plot yields five or six times a year against two on a high ridge. Late winter leaf, including much of the dongpian sold on the island, comes off ground like this rather than off the mountains, because the bushes are still awake in December.
How it is made here
Machine harvesting and mechanised rolling, at a scale nowhere else in Taiwan runs. The sequence is the standard one, wither, toss, fix, then repeated cloth-bag rolling, but the bags go through machines and the batches are large. The second business is refining: Mingjian buys in finished leaf from other townships and from abroad, sorts it, re-fires it and blends it, so a large share of the tea sold in Taiwan passes through this township on its way to a buyer.
What to look for
A Mingjian address does not tell you where the leaf grew. The township is a processing and trading hub as much as a growing one, so tea finished here may have been grown anywhere, and the plateau openly processes black and green tea raw material brought in from abroad, which is one of the routes by which foreign leaf enters the Taiwanese trade. If origin matters to you, ask for the garden rather than the town. On its own terms Mingjian tea is honest, competent and cheap, and the mistake is buying it as a discount high mountain oolong, which it neither is nor claims to be.
How it got here
Mingjian's rise is tied to a market rather than to a tradition. The hand-shaken drinks trade that grew out of Taiwan from the 1980s needed a large, cheap and consistent supply of oolong base, and flat mechanisable ground in the middle of the island was where that came from. Si Ji Chun, recognised in 1981, arrived at close to the perfect moment for it, and the township has been organised around volume ever since.
Other places in Nantou
- Lugu
- Yuchi (Sun Moon Lake)
- Shanlinxi
- Zhushan
- Yushan
- Ren'ai (Aowanda)
- Xinyi (Nantou)