Taiwan Tea Guy

Pinglin is the baojong tea center of Taiwan, and I recently rode through there on a bike trip (see Pinglin Road Trip). I plan to do a more in-depth report on the town in the future, but here are a few pictures for now. The town is a lot like small rural town in the US. The main highway out to the coast cuts the town in half, and a new freeway built nearby bypasses the town completely, making it harder than usual to make a living. Everyone in town is tied to the tea business in some way, and tea tourism is a major part of the economy. They have a large tea museum (that’s actually pretty good), hold a Baojong Tea Festival every year, and they have recently developed an extensive system of biking/hiking trails as well.

The ‘main drag’ through town is naturally lined with restaurant/tea shops that cater to the tourists. They’re all pretty much the same type of shop - a big open space, tea & teaware on the walls, tables in the middle, and a kitchen on the front so people can get a look at what’s cookin’ (it ain’t usually good lookin’).

Although a lot of newer construction is going on, there are still parts of town that maintain their ‘rustic’ origins. This building here was probably built 50+ years ago, from large adobe-style mud bricks laid at angles (I think I was told that the angle allows the pressure of the bricks to seal gaps and maintain strength, but it’s likely my source didn’t know what he was talking about!).

There’s also a nice temple on one of the back streets (they are more common than city parks in the US).

And just so you don’t think the town has lost it’s rural charms, here are some shots of the approach from Taipei on Highway 9.  You can see rice fields mixed in with the tea farms, and lots of bamboo everywhere as well. The river you see feeds into the Fei Tsui Reservoir, which produces most of the drinking water for Taipei county.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 pm and is filed under My Tea Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.