Jinxuan resurgent
With three decades came changing fortunes. During the tumult engendered by the popularity of high-mountain oolong, sales of low- to mid-altitude oolongs were slack, giving rise to thoughts of how to adapt. In the case of Jinxuan, a well-loved Taiwan tea, the makers shifted from the oolong manufacturing process to that of black tea. All of a sudden, every-thing old was new again.
Lan Fangren, who heads both the Ming-jian Farmers' Association and the Association of Taiwan Tea, explains that the Japanese were fond of Western-style black tea. But since the high latitudes of Japan were poorly suited for growing black tea, they decided to open a black tea research institute in lower-latitude Yang-mei, Taiwan, to try growing different tea varieties with the intention of producing black tea.
In 1945, at the close of World War II, Wu Chen-tau, known as the Father of Taiwan Tea, came here from a Fujianese tea village and took charge of the experimental tea facility in Yang-mei. He selected three varieties-Nos. 2027, 2028 and 2029-from among 4,300 tea bushes the Japanese had planted. The first two of these became Taiwan Tea No. 12 (Jin-xuan) and Taiwan Tea No. 13 (Cuiyu) respectively.
As Taiwan's economy boomed in the 1980s, domestic demand for oolong tea rose accordingly, with prices jumping to NT$2,000 a kilogram. Tea farmers started switching from making fully fermented black tea from their Jin-xuan tea, instead producing semi-fermented oolong. Jin-xuan's characteristic creamy, sugar-cane aroma was an instant success, and people started thinking that Jin-xuan had always been a type of oolong.
In the olden days, Ming-jian (Nan-tou -County), Wen-shan (Tai-pei City), and Dong-ding (Lugu, Nan-tou -County) were Taiwan's three major growing areas for high-quality tea. In the last two decades, oolong tea has been growing not only in high-altitude regions (over 1,000 m) in Mei-shan, Lu-shan and Ali-shan; it has even extended beyond the sea where it's grown in Southeast Asia and China. And Ming-jian Township, Taiwan's largest tea-growing area, located in the foothills of the Ba-gua-shan Range in Nan-tou County at an elevation of merely 300-400 m, is home to the celebrated Songbo Evergreen Tea (an oolong so named in 1975 by Chiang Ching-kuo after the region's Songbo Peak), which has fallen steadily from its former wholesale price of NT$1,600 down to just NT$360 per catty (600 grams).
Lan Fangren admits that some tea farmers, amid their pursuit of the distinctive creamy bouquet, would add artificial flavorings during processing to cover up poor-quality or improperly roasted leaves, giving the tea an unnatural aroma. This is one of the reasons why the price of Ming-jian Township oolong tea kept falling.
For years,"bubble tea," in which sugar, cream and tapioca are added to black tea, has been trendy in Taiwan. More recently,"kung fu tea"has become popular, highlighting the subtle aftertaste of plain black tea.