Written by Junhong Ma. This article follows the journey of Jinxuan, Taiwan’s celebrated tea cultivar, tracing how it acquires new names, meanings, and sensory identities across Taiwan and beyond. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical inquiry, it shows how cultivars circulate through agricultural science, markets, translation, and taste, revealing tea as a living assemblage shaped by plants, people, technologies, and transnational cultural exchanges.
Written by Pauline Harlay. Drawing on ethnographic research in Taiwan’s tea industry, this article examines how the concept of terroir (風土) has been reinterpreted as both a commercial strategy and a political project. It argues that defining the distinctive tastes of Taiwanese tea is not merely about marketing quality or origin, but also about asserting national identity, territorial distinctiveness, and economic resilience amid intensifying cross-Strait geopolitical tensions.
