Region · in Taiwan
New Taipei
New Taipei is the municipality that wraps all the way around Taipei city, and it grows considerably more tea than the city it encloses. It holds two traditions that have almost nothing to do with each other: the twisted, unroasted Baozhong of the Wenshan hills in the southeast, and the pan-fired green teas of Sanxia in the southwest, which are close to the only green tea Taiwan makes. Neither is a mountain tea, which is why neither fits the picture most buyers have of the island.
What grows here
Baozhong above all, from Pinglin and from Shiding beside it, sold under the historic district name Wenshan. Sanxia, on the far side of the municipality, makes Bi Luo Chun and Longjing, both green and both from a cultivar grown almost nowhere else in Taiwan. There is no high mountain oolong here at all and no roasting tradition worth the name, so the two things New Taipei is good at are the two things the rest of the island mostly gave up on.
The ground
Northern Taiwan is wetter and cloudier than the island's tea reputation suggests. The gardens sit in low folded hills of a few hundred metres, and the northeast monsoon carries cloud and drizzle in off the sea through the winter, so the season is long, damp and rarely bright. That suits lightly oxidised aromatic tea and it suits green tea, both of which this municipality makes, and it rules out the cold clear alpine conditions the high mountain trade is sold on.
What to look for
The two names a buyer actually meets are Wenshan and Sanxia, and neither matches a modern administrative boundary. Wenshan is a historic district covering hill country in both New Taipei and Taipei city, so it means northern Taiwan rather than a township, and Pinglin, Shiding and Muzha all sit inside it. New Taipei itself almost never appears on a packet. Treat the township as the smallest unit anyone here will stand behind, and treat a bare Taipei address as geography written by somebody who has not been.
How it got here
This is where the Taiwanese tea trade became an export business. Tamsui, at the river mouth in the north of what is now New Taipei, was the treaty port the first Formosa oolong shipped out of, going direct to New York by 1869, and the gardens that fed it were spread through the hills around the capital. Industry and housing then took most of that ground across the twentieth century. What survived did so in the townships too steep or too far out to build on, which is why the municipality's tea is now concentrated in a handful of southern valleys.
Places in New Taipei
Named places inside New Taipei. The ones with a page of their own are links.