Place · in New Taipei
Sanxia
Sanxia is the exception that shows how completely Taiwan committed to oolong. It is a low township in the southwestern corner of New Taipei, and what it makes is green tea: Bi Luo Chun and a Taiwanese Longjing, in a country where green tea is otherwise a rounding error. It does it with a cultivar planted almost nowhere else on the island, which is why the results taste nothing like the Chinese teas they share their names with.
What grows here
Two green teas and effectively nothing else. Sanxia Bi Luo Chun is the spiral-rolled downy one, picked very young, and Sanxia Longjing is the flat pressed leaf finished against a hot pan. Both come off the same gardens and the same bushes and both are spring work. Taiwan makes so little green tea that this one township accounts for the great majority of what the domestic market sees.
The ground
Low ground where the Sanxia river comes out of the hills, warm enough to flush weeks before the mountain gardens have woken up. This is the opposite of everything Taiwan advertises: no altitude, no cloud forest, no cold nights and nothing to say about mist. For a tea bought on the tenderness of an early bud rather than on the depth a slow season gives an oolong, none of that is a loss, which is the argument the township has quietly been making for decades.
The bushes
Qing Xin Gan Zai, green heart tangerine, is the Sanxia bush and it is barely grown anywhere else in Taiwan. It is a small-leaved cultivar carrying fine white down on the bud, which is what makes the Bi Luo Chun style possible here at all, and it is the single biggest reason a Sanxia green is a different tea from a Jiangsu one made under the same name. If a Taiwanese green does not name its cultivar, that is the question to ask.
Harvest seasons
Spring, and mostly the early part of it. Later flushes are picked and made, but a green tea is sold on bud tenderness rather than on the concentration a long cool season buys an oolong, so the township's reputation rests almost entirely on the first pickings of the year. Sanxia's warmth means those come early by Taiwanese standards, which for once is an advantage rather than the mark of cheap lowland leaf.
How it is made here
Green tea processing, which is the Taiwanese oolong sequence with the whole middle taken out. There is no long wither, no tossing, no oxidation to judge and no cloth-bag rolling: the leaf is fixed soon after it comes in, then shaped. Bi Luo Chun is rolled into tight downy spirals and Longjing is pressed flat against the pan. These are Chinese green tea skills rather than Taiwanese oolong skills, and holding onto them while the rest of the island went the other way is most of what makes the place unusual.
What to look for
Both of Sanxia's teas share a name with a far more famous Chinese one and neither is a copy. Bi Luo Chun means the Dongting hills in Jiangsu to most buyers and Longjing means West Lake, while these are a different cultivar grown in a different country, so judging one against the other tells you nothing useful. Buy it as a Taiwanese green tea or do not buy it. Then treat it as green tea: it has a season on it and it fades, and a shop set up for oolong may not be storing it as though that matters.
How it got here
Taiwan spent the decades after the Second World War making green tea for export, much of it bound for North Africa, and Sanxia was part of that industry. When those orders fell away the rest of the island turned back to oolong and Sanxia did not. It kept the green tea skills and pointed them at the domestic market instead, which is where the Bi Luo Chun and the Longjing it sells today came from. The township also has a long side history in camphor and indigo, both of which went the same way, and tea is what is left.
Other places in New Taipei
- Pinglin
- Shiding