Place · in New Taipei
Pinglin
Pinglin is where Baozhong comes from. It is a small township in the hills southeast of Taipei, inside the catchment that supplies the capital's drinking water, and it makes the one Taiwanese oolong that is never rolled into a ball: open twisted strips, barely oxidised, unroasted and drunk young. On an island that balls and roasts almost everything else, that makes Pinglin the exception rather than a variation on the theme.
What grows here
Wenshan Baozhong, and very little else worth naming. Wenshan is a historic district name for the hill country southeast of Taipei rather than a modern boundary, so the label also covers Shiding next door and the Muzha side of Taipei city, but Pinglin grows most of it. The bushes are mostly Qing Xin, with Jin Xuan and Si Ji Chun behind it on the cheaper lots.
The ground
Low wet hills a few hundred metres up, cut by the Beishi river, with the northeast monsoon pushing cloud and drizzle over them through the winter. Nothing here is high mountain and nobody local pretends otherwise. The constraint that actually shapes the township is regulatory: Pinglin sits inside the protection zone for the Feitsui reservoir, which supplies Taipei, so building is restricted and what a farmer puts on the ground is watched. The gardens survive in a valley that would otherwise have been developed decades ago.
The bushes
Qing Xin, the same low-yielding bush that makes high mountain oolong further south, also called Luan Ze or Ruan Zhi, soft stem. Pinglin is the one place that puts it to a strip oolong instead of rolling it into pellets, which is a useful reminder that the shape of a Taiwanese tea is a decision about processing and not a fact about the plant. Jin Xuan and Si Ji Chun turn up in cheaper Baozhong and bring their own loud florality with them.
Harvest seasons
Spring and winter, as across Taiwan, with winter lots followed for a tighter, sharper aroma. What matters more here is the clock after the picking. Baozhong has no roast to protect it and only a little oxidation, so the florality it is bought for drops away over months rather than years. A harvest date on the packet is worth more on this tea than on any other Taiwanese oolong, and a shop that cannot tell you the season is telling you something.
How it is made here
The signature is a step nobody takes. After sun withering, indoor withering and a light tossing to start oxidation, the leaf is rolled loosely and dried, and that is the end of it. No cloth bag, no repeated ball rolling and traditionally no roast, so the leaf stays as long open twists and the whole tea rests on the wither and on how far the maker let oxidation run, which is far less than any other Taiwanese oolong. It is also the least forgiving to make: with no fire to hide behind, a clumsy wither is in the cup.
What to look for
Baozhong is a processing style and it is made in Nantou and abroad too, so Wenshan on a label is a claim about northern Taiwan and not about this township. Ask which town, then ask which year, because this is the Taiwanese oolong that ages worst and a shop clearing old stock knows it. Roasted and aged Baozhong are legitimate things to sell and different things to buy, so read the description rather than the name. One local quirk: much of Pinglin's tea is sold face to face to weekend visitors from Taipei, which holds prices above what the same leaf fetches through a wholesaler.
How it got here
The method and the name both came from Anxi in Fujian, where a merchant is said to have sold a twisted leaf tea folded into squares of paper: bao zhong means wrapped kind. Anxi migrants are credited with bringing it to Nangang, on the eastern edge of what is now Taipei, late in the nineteenth century, and it spread southeast into the Wenshan hills from there, with Pinglin ending up as the centre of production. The other date that shaped the town is 2006, when the Hsuehshan tunnel opened and the Taipei to Yilan traffic that used to stop here for tea went under the mountain instead.
Other places in New Taipei
- Sanxia
- Shiding