Taiwan tea timeline
Taiwanese tea has not always looked like this. From the first export logged at Tamsui customs, through the turn from selling abroad to selling at home, the lifting of the manufacturing controls, and growers beginning to process and sell their own — every one of those turns is still inside the packet you buy today.
- 1865The industry
The first recorded export of Taiwanese tea
Tamsui customs logged over 82,000 kg of tea leaving that year — the earliest formal record of Taiwanese tea being exported, and it already included oolong from around Longtan, shipped down the Dahan river to the customs house. In the same years John Dodd surveyed the northern tea hills and brought in Anxi seedlings and Anxi makers, moving Taiwanese tea from rough processing to refined.
- 1867The industry
Top of the export grades: Bai Hao oolong
Foreign trading houses sorted Taiwanese oolong into twenty-two grades, and the top one was “extra choice Bai Hao oolong” — the ancestor of what we now call Oriental Beauty. The same year Dodd trial-shipped his first refined oolong to Macau, and by 1869 it was sailing straight to New York, where “Formosa Oolong” started to mean something.
- 1878The industry
The tea gardens spread into Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli
The customs report of that year put it bluntly: fifteen years earlier you could hardly find a tea bush on the slopes around Dadaocheng; now they were covered, right up to the frontier line. Planting had pushed south to the 24th parallel, close to central Taiwan, and Hsinchu had become a new producing region.
- 1895The industry
Research institutions, and the base they laid
With the Japanese administration came planted gardens, research institutes for cultivation and for leaf processing, and subsidies for pest control and cultivar improvement. For the first time Taiwanese tea had long-term technical backing rather than merchants and growers each working it out alone.
- 1905The industry
Black tea starts being made at Yangmei
The Japan-Taiwan Tea Company set up black tea manufacture at Yangmei. The country’s output began widening beyond oolong, and Taoyuan picked up a black tea line it has never entirely put down.
- 1936The industry
The Emei tea growers’ association is founded
The growers of Emei in Hsinchu organised. From here the district had a shared channel for selling and for quality control — the organisational groundwork for Emei later overtaking Beipu in planted area.
- 1961The industry
Longtan makes steamed green tea for Japan
A factory at Longtan in Taoyuan went into steamed green tea made specifically for the Japanese market. The same district makes whatever the market asks for — which is also why Longtan could switch to *phòng-hong* tea later.
- 1968The industry
The Shakeng factory becomes the largest in the Far East
A record of scale at the height of the export era. Read it next to the entry seven years later: the biggest factory appeared, and then the whole industry turned.
- 1975The industry
The watershed: from export to the home market
Before 1975 Taiwanese tea was mostly for export; after it the home market took over, and by the 1980s the flip was complete. Domestically, competitions set the price — a top or first prize can multiply what a lot is worth several times over. Beipu built tourism around its old street and carried the tea’s name with it; Emei overtook Beipu in planted area from then on, and still leads.
- 1982The industry
The provincial tea manufacturing rules are repealed
With the controls lifted, making tea no longer had to follow one prescribed set of rules. Small growers could process and sell their own, and only then did the districts get complicated. Every producer-run garden you visit on a hillside today starts here.
- 1990The industry
A cross-district supply chain takes shape
Beipu and Emei divided the work: Emei supplied the leaf, Beipu did the selling. Planting spread to Toufen in Miaoli, Longtan in Taoyuan and Guanxi in Hsinchu, forming a cross-district chain. By now “origin” is not a point on the map but a network.