Tea aficionados and traditional culture enthusiasts will feel right at home at Youji Mingcha (有記名茶), a tea shop in Taipei’s Dadaocheng (大稻埕) District.
Customers sit in the warmly-lit parlor of this 70-year-old brick building near Chongqing North Road (重慶北路), sampling the shop’s oolong, black and green teas, while employees play the attentive host, pouring tea and discussing the characteristics of each brew.
If the huge selection feels overwhelming, head upstairs and sip complimentary tea while listening to the quaint sounds of nanguan (南管), traditional chamber music from China’s Fujian Province, performed by a group of middle-aged and elderly enthusiasts who gather here every Saturday afternoon.
Youji Mingcha is a family business that dates back to 1890. The operation has come a long way from its early days as an export distributor. In addition to selling and processing high-end, locally grown teas, the shop serves as a museum and educational resource, and offers tours of its small factory room in the back, where the teas are cured in traditional charcoal ovens.
But people don’t come just to learn about
tea, says 32-year-old Charmaine Wang (王聖雯), whose forebearers founded Youji Mingcha.
“Some people also want to learn about the history of Dadaocheng.”
A CITY BUILT ON TEA
That history is intimately tied to the nation’s favorite beverage. Dadaocheng became the center of Taiwan’s tea trade in the late 1800s thanks in part to “Formosa Tea,” which was
first exported to the West by British merchant John Dodd.
Demand boomed for this strain of oolong, which was mostly grown in Northern Taiwan. This prompted droves of merchants from Europe, the US and China to set up trading and distribution offices at Dadaocheng.
At the peak of the trade, there were several hundred tea-processing factories in the area, which contributed to Dadaocheng’s growth as Taiwan’s major trading port, according to Wang Lien-yuan (王連源), Charmaine’s father and Youji Mingcha’s current owner.
“You could say that the tea leaf helped spread urban development from the south to the north,” he said, referring to Tainan’s former role as Taiwan’s capital. “Because of tea, Taipei transformed and flourished [as a city].”
FROM EXPORT BUSINESS TO MUSEUM
Wang’s family moved its business from Xiamen to Taiwan in 1907 to capitalize on the demand for Formosa Tea, and exported mainly to Southeast Asia. Youji Mingcha is one of the few tea distributors left from Dadaocheng’s glory days.
It has survived by changing with the times. The tea export business had declined by the 1970s as Taiwan’s rapid industrialization siphoned off workers from the agricultural sector and the nation lost its competitive edge to other tea producers, such as India and Sri Lanka.
But at the same time, economic conditions improved and local demand for tea grew. Merchants then started to market tea in Taiwan for the first time, said Wang, and this marked a new beginning for Youji Mingcha.
“We began to do domestic sales in 1975,” he said. “By the 1990s, people started to have higher expectations of their standard of living, and so then we started to change.”
Wang renovated his shop with the “hope of encouraging Taiwanese tea culture” to blossom. He made the lobby more presentable, adding modern furnishings, but preserved the building’s original architectural features such as the traditional front doors and timber ceiling beams. He also opened the processing room so visitors could see how the teas are processed.
SWEET AROMA
At first glance, the factory area seems unremarkable — it’s dimly lit, drab and full of aging equipment gathering dust — but what struck me upon entering was the sweet and fragrant aroma of tea that lingered from the curing room. You can see the caffeine on the walls, which forms as a brown residue from the curing process.
The shop still relies on the same curing method from the early days of the business. Tea leaves are placed in large bamboo baskets and roasted over pits filled with rice husk charcoal.
The roasting process, which serves to further refine the flavors of each tea, is a delicate operation that requires careful control of the temperature by adjusting the amount of charcoal. During the day, you can watch two middle-aged “masters” employed by Youji Mingcha at work.
Youji Mingcha says its curing process contributes to the unique character of its teas, some of which fetch high prices: the top grade of the shop’s signature Qizhong Oolong (奇種烏龍) costs up to NT$2,400 per 600g.
The wide selection includes various grades of Wenshan Baozhong (文山包種), Oriental Beauty (東方美人, also known as “champagne oolong”) and High Mountain Oolong (高山烏龍), which Charmaine Wang poured for me on a recent visit.
THE TASTE TEST
Since I’m just a casual tea drinker, she started off by asking whether I preferred heavy or light flavors. She said “80 percent” of customers that come to Youji Mingcha like High Mountain, which is grown at high altitudes, because “it is neither light nor heavy” and has its “own unique taste.” I found the tea to have a slightly fruity flavor, similar to the aroma in the curing room.
Though brewing tea is considered by some to be an art form, Wang says there are no rules, only personal preference. “Everybody has different tastes,” she said. “So we have one lesson that says ‘there’s no need to study how to make tea’ because everyone has their own style of making it.”
This is a refreshing attitude from a family of connoisseurs and perhaps a good strategy for attracting new customers. Meanwhile, I’ve resolved to return to Youji Mingcha on a Saturday afternoon and listen to a nanguan performance, which the elder Wang says recalls the earlier days of Dadaocheng when Fujian immigrant tea merchants spent their evenings at home playing flutes and stringed instruments.
Wang is heartened by the fact that his children have shown an interest in the business and its history. Charmaine and her 25-year-old brother, Jason Wang (王聖鈞), run Youji Mingcha’s day-to-day operations.
“When you bring culture into a traditional industry, younger people will like it,” he said. “We’re hoping more young people will accept this line of business.”
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
Power struggles are never pretty. Fortunately, Taiwan is a democracy so there is no blood in the streets, but there are volunteers collecting signatures to recall nearly half of the legislature. With the exceptions of the “September Strife” in 2013 and the Sunflower movement occupation of the Legislative Yuan and the aftermath in 2014, for 16 years the legislative and executive branches of government were relatively at peace because the ruling party also controlled the legislature. Now they are at war. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) holds the presidency and the Executive Yuan and the pan-blue coalition led by the
For decades, Taiwan Railway trains were built and serviced at the Taipei Railway Workshop, originally built on a flat piece of land far from the city center. As the city grew up around it, however, space became limited, flooding became more commonplace and the noise and air pollution from the workshop started to affect more and more people. Between 2011 and 2013, the workshop was moved to Taoyuan and the Taipei location was retired. Work on preserving this cultural asset began immediately and we now have a unique opportunity to see the birth of a museum. The Preparatory Office of National
RSS