Region · in Taiwan
Taitung
Taitung is the far southeast, a hot low county on the Pacific coast a long way from where the tea trade normally looks, and its answer to that was to invent a style. Red Oolong (Hong Wu Long) was worked out at the Taitung branch of the government tea research station and put into growers' hands from 2008. It is the newest Taiwanese style with a name of its own.
What grows here
Red Oolong above all, centred on Luye, the terrace township up the rift valley from Taitung city. The same gardens make ordinary rolled oolong from Qing Xin, Jin Xuan and Cui Yu, and honey-fragrance teas from leaf the leafhoppers have been at, which the heat down here encourages. None of this is high mountain tea and none of it is sold as such.
The ground
Low, hot and exposed. The gardens sit on the river terraces of the rift valley at a few hundred metres, in a subtropical climate with a long growing season, heavy summer rain and typhoons arriving off the Pacific. Those are poor conditions for a delicate green oolong and reasonable ones for heavily oxidised tea, which is the logic the county's style was built on rather than a consolation for it.
Places in Taitung
Named places inside Taitung. The ones with a page of their own are links.