Fangcun's Taiwanese tea merchantsThese days, Taiwanese tea merchants in China deal from their own shops. And as their numbers have grown, they've begun to hang their shingles in Fangcun by the Pearl River.
The area is currently home to 30-40 Taiwanese tea merchants. Most sell Taiwanese teas, but some also deal in Taiwanese-style oolongs, as well as local and pu-erh teas.
The Tea Professor was Fangcun's first tea shop to deal solely in Taiwanese tea. Owner Hsu Lung-pao says that business was great a decade ago--he never had a moment's rest from when he opened his shop at 8 a.m. till he closed it at 11 p.m.
Chen Chih-jen originally distributed Taiwanese tea in the Shantou and Pearl River Delta areas. Noting which way the wind was blowing, he moved to Fangcun five years ago, opening Tang Ming Huang Tea Company to trade in Taiwanese tea.
"Taiwanese don't pick tea anymore," says Lin Yen-hsin, another Taiwanese dealer in Fangcun. Lin adds that her husband's family long ago stopped cultivating their two hectares of fields in Taipei County's Sanhsia Township. Unable to make a living growing tea in Taiwan, they began selling tea in China. Her husband also planted 50 hectares of tieguanyin and 20 hectares of Taicha No. 12 (a new hybrid Taiwanese oolong also known as Chinhsuen) in Fujian, operating at a scale dozens of times that of his old family farm in Sanhsia. Their Fujian plantation produces some 70,000 catties (35,000 kilograms) annually of what as known as "Taiwanese-style tea," that is, Taiwanese varieties grown in the mainland.
Initially, Lin shipped mainland tea and Taiwanese-style tea back to Taiwan for resale. But getting the tea through customs was troublesome and time-consuming, typically taking one to two months. When the tea eventually arrived in Taiwan, it was no longer fresh and its mouthfeel had suffered. Five years ago, she decided on a change of approach. After spending more than RMB200,000 on a transfer fee to rent a 30-square-meter storefront in Fangcun, she opened her own shop, Shangpin Tea, from which to sell her family's Taiwanese-style teas.
Chang Yi-hsiung, another Fangcun-based Taiwanese tea merchant who hails from Chiayi, has poured ten years into making a go of Shuizhongyue, a shop dealing exclusively in Taiwanese teas. Chang believes that if he works hard and is honest with his customers, he'll eventually win a piece of the huge mainland market. "Persistence pays off in the end," he says.
Chang's life is a simple one--he doesn't gamble or go out on the town at all. Instead, this man who seems to thrive on hardship devotes his every waking moment to tea.
Wu Hsin-tien of Kaohsiung also used to sell Taiwanese tea in Fangcun, but the intense competition in the town, as well as his own lack of expertise in Taiwanese tea, kept his business from really taking off. Three years ago, he switched to dealing in pu-erh, the flavor of which improves with age, eliminating the need to quickly dispose of inventory. At the time he made his decision, he had no idea that pu-erh was poised for a resurgence in popularity, and he inadvertently became the most profitable Taiwanese tea merchant in Fangcun. "Just one moment of carelessness, and I was wealthy," says Wu, who finds the situation just as amusing as everyone else does.
The market for pu-erh really is a little bit out of control. For example, round-cake Fuyuanchang tea produced in the late 19th century sells for RMB100,000 per cake and Dazi Luyin pu-erh from the 1950s goes for RMB210,000 per seven-cake "bucket." No wonder people say that the blacker the pu-erh, the blacker the heart of the person dealing in it.