During the Qing Dynasty era, tea, sugar and camphor were Taiwan’s three leading export commodities. Hsinchu’s humid and foggy climate was well suited to cultivating tea plants and from the time of the Qing it was an important tea-producing region. Exports reached a new height during the Japanese colonial period and this continued into the heyday of the 1970s when there were 35 tea producers in Hsinchu’s Guanxi Township with exports of tea leaves going all around the world.
King Tai Tea Corporation (錦泰茶廠), founded in 1936, could at its peak produce 4.5 tonnes of tea leaves in a day. Originally a producer of black tea with tea-growing knowhow passed down over decades and with preserved intact artefacts of its tea factory, in December 2013 the company obtained the Hakka TAIWAN logo certification under the Hakka Affairs Council’s “Hakka Regional Production and Economic Integration Plan,” certifying King Tai as a famous northern Taiwan tea company with over 80 years of history.
Lo Chi-chuan (羅吉銓), the company’s third-generation head who was born in the Japanese colonial era and is nearly 80 years old, has borne witness to the rise and fall of Guanxi’s tea industry. From its establishment, King Tai was renowned for the export of Guanxi’s unique black tea. Later, in response to global trends in tea consumption, it would go on to produce baozhong and green tea for export. From the 1980s, however, with the development of Taiwan’s industry and a reduction in tea fields, the system of producing tea for export took a blow and attention gradually turned to the domestic market. While Hsinchu County was originally Taiwan’s leading tea producer, it was gradually overtaken by Nantou County. As of today, only six tea producers remain in Guanxi.
The venerable tea company possesses a deep cultural value. In order that this part of history may not be forgotten by the public, King Tai after converting its factory for tourism has positioned it as the King Tai Tea Museum, exhibiting many precious resources such as tea-producing machinery from the Japanese colonial era to today. It has Taiwan’s biggest panning and drying machines, and has also preserved many tea artefacts such as traditional Hakka insulation baskets woven from rice stalks (“chashou, 茶壽”) and Japanese-era tea award certificates. These not only introduce the public to the Guanxi tea industry’s cultural history but also share knowledge of tea production and tasting. For Lo Chi-chuan, it is precisely the experience of the glory days of Guanxi’s tea industry that gives him the mission to pass it on today.