Place · in Taichung
Lishan
Lishan is a ridge in the mountains of Taichung and one of the two names at the top of the Taiwanese altitude ladder, with Da Yu Ling on the same road. Gardens run from roughly 1,600 m up to about 2,600 m at Fushou Shan, high enough that a plot gives two pickings a year where lowland Taiwan takes four or more. The ground underneath is a patchwork of indigenous reserve land, state farms worked by resettled veterans and leased forestry plots, which is why supply here is set by land policy at least as much as by the market.
What grows here
Ball-rolled high mountain oolong and essentially nothing else. Li Shan is a trade name for a whole stretch of ridge rather than a single garden, and it covers several separate growing areas, the best known being Fushou Shan, a Veterans Affairs Council farm that sells tea under its own name. Da Yu Ling, further up, is counted as its own origin rather than as part of Li Shan. There is no black tea tradition here and no roasting tradition: the output is light, green and unroasted.
The ground
Steep ground at the practical ceiling for the crop. Nights are cold enough for frost and for occasional snow. The compensation for that risk is how slowly everything grows, since months of near dormancy between flushes is what an altitude premium is actually buying. It also means a garden recovers slowly from a bad year, which is part of why supply here never responds quickly to demand.
The bushes
Qing Xin, near enough exclusively, and that is a market fact rather than an agronomic one. Jin Xuan and Si Ji Chun are the tougher and far more productive plants, but nobody pays an altitude premium for them, so the cultivar question that matters everywhere else on the island barely arises up here. Qing Xin is also awkward to establish: growers prefer to put it into freshly cleared, free-draining sloping ground rather than replant an old plot, which is one reason high mountain planting has tended to move uphill rather than renew itself in place.
Harvest seasons
Two pickings, and both are late. Spring comes at the end of May, several weeks behind Alishan, and winter at the end of October, because the cold holds the bushes back at each end of the year. That lateness is a useful check on a label: a Li Shan sold as an April spring tea is either not from Li Shan or not from the high plots. There is no summer crop worth the name.
What to look for
Li Shan is a ridge, not a garden, and the name reaches a long way down the road past the elevations buyers picture. Ask for the specific area and the elevation, because anyone holding Fushou Shan or a top plot names it rather than hiding it behind the ridge. The harvest date is the second check, since genuine high Li Shan is picked at the end of May and the end of October. And treat the supply as shrinking rather than elastic: the state has been taking the highest plots back rather than letting more be planted.
How it got here
Tea here is very recent, later than Alishan and a century behind Dong Ding. The high ground was opened by the Central Cross-Island Highway and planted with temperate fruit, some of it on state farms worked by resettled veterans. Tea followed once growers found the leaf paid better per hectare than the fruit. Some of it sits on forestry leases written for trees rather than tea. The government has been recovering plots as those leases fall in, and in 2015 it cleared and replanted the highest of them on the Da Yu Ling stretch, which is why the top of this ridge shrinks rather than grows.
Other places in Taichung
- Dayuling
- Fushou Shan
- Heping