Image credit: 台灣茶訊茶友會
Tea is more than a plant or a beverage; it is a matrix of multisensory materiality, social memories, and migratory routes. For centuries, the leaves harvested from Taiwan’s misty ridges have done far more than fill domestic cups, charting routes across oceans, transforming rugged borderlands, and reshaping the island nation’s cultural landscape. This special issue features seven perspectives to map these “Relational Routes”, tracing how Taiwan tea serves as a dynamic, living practice that continually negotiates geopolitics, identity, and global connections.
Our exploration begins by crossing borders into the hills of Southeast Asia through an introduction to a new book that details how Taiwan’s tea took root on Thailand’s northern borderland, revealing the historical migrations that carried cultivation techniques and identities across geopolitical divides. This global fluidity is mirrored on a deeply personal scale in two parts of an essay exploring a life trajectory profoundly entangled with tea, showing how global travel and personal identity can be filtered through the lens of tea leaves. Closer to home, this collection highlights the concepts of tradition and place. While tea cultivation by Fujianese immigrants stretches back to the 18th century, the formalised phenomenon we call “Tea Art” is a surprisingly modern creation. To see beyond the lens of tradition, this issue reframes this tea practice not as a static artefact but as a shifting, living response to Taiwan’s rapid socio-political and economic transformations. We then move from the cultural salon to the visceral reality of the landscape by shifting the focus to the tea maker’s body as a site of sensory knowledge, exploring how artisans attune themselves to the immediate environment to make instinctive manufacturing decisions. We look at the inward and outward pivots of the industry since the 1980s, an era that saw Taiwan tea transition from an export-driven market to an intimate, domestic ritual. Finally, we ascend to the misty ridges of Alishan to examine how tea farmers are navigating contemporary environmental and economic crises. By pivoting toward nature-based cultivation, climate-controlled technology, and intimate cultural tourism, this perspective envisions a resilient cultural economy that redefines high-mountain tea not merely as a market commodity, but as a sustainable partnership rooted in ecology, heritage, and deep-seated care.
When Tea Becomes Everything (Part 1) Written by Gawin Tiansuwan
When Tea Becomes Everything (Part 2) Written by Gawin Tiansuwan
From Poppies to Tea Gardens: How Taiwan’s Tea Took Root on Thailand’s Northern Borderland Written by Po-Yi Hung
Taiwan Tea Written by Chen Chih-hao.
Taiwanese Tea Art Beyond the Lens of Tradition Written by Thiago Braga
The Politics of Taiwanese Tea Terroirs Written by Pauline Harlay
High-Mountain Tea in Alishan: Envisioning a Cultural Economy for a Sustainable Future Written by Hong Jiang.