From a Scottish Merchant to High Mountain Oolong: 160 Years of Taiwanese Tea

Tea History & Culture｜Author：祥興茶行｜Published：2026-07-15

In 1869, two sailing ships carried "Formosa Oolong" straight into New York harbor; by the 1980s Taiwan had reinvented itself as a high-mountain oolong kingdom. Here is the four-act industry history — plus a hard look at the marketing myths, including the one about Queen Victoria naming Oriental Beauty.

In 1869, two sailing ships carried roughly 2,131 piculs of tea — about 127,000 kilograms — into New York harbor. The crates bore a name no American had seen before: "Formosa Oolong Tea." It was the first time Taiwanese tea reached an international market under its own name [1]. Behind the shipment stood a Scottish merchant and a Taiwanese comprador. Yet 160 years later, the most famous name in Taiwanese tea is high mountain oolong. What happened in between?

A "Formosa Oolong" export advertisement from around the 1920s. Taiwanese oolong was sold to Europe and America as Formosa Oolong — the starting point of this story.

What this piece covers: roughly 160 years of Taiwanese tea in four acts — export oolong under late Qing rule, the rise of black tea under Japanese rule, the postwar green tea boom, and the pivot to a high mountain tea kingdom in the 1980s. Each act comes with verifiable dates and figures, and we close by taking apart a few marketing stories that often get passed off as history.

```mermaid flowchart LR A["Act I Late Qing 1860–1895 Oolong exports · rise of Dadaocheng"] --> B["Act II Japanese rule 1895–1945 Mechanized processing · black tea arrives"] B --> C["Act III Postwar 1945–1970s Green tea dominates exports"] C --> D["Act IV 1980s to today Turn to the home market · high mountain tea"] style A fill:#fbfdf9,stroke:#3e6b4e,stroke-width:2px style B fill:#fbf6ec,stroke:#9a4a2e,stroke-width:2px style C fill:#fbfdf9,stroke:#b07a2e,stroke-width:2px style D fill:#fbf6ec,stroke:#3e6b4e,stroke-width:2px ```

Act I: A Scottish Merchant and a Dadaocheng Comprador (1860–1895)

Tea growing in Taipei supposedly begins in the Jiaqing era of the Qing dynasty (1796–1820). In the "Agriculture" chapter of his General History of Taiwan, Lien Heng records that a man named Ke Chao brought Wuyi tea seeds back from Fujian and planted them around a place called Yukeng — the exact location is uncertain, with Ruifang and Wenshan both proposed [1][9]. One caveat matters here: the General History of Taiwan was completed in 1918, roughly a century after the events it describes. This is traditional narrative rather than contemporaneous archive, so "supposedly" is as far as we can go.

The turning point that documents actually support came after Tamsui opened as a treaty port in 1860. The earliest record of tea shipped from northern Taiwan to Xiamen dates to 1861 [2]. The Scottish merchant John Dodd founded Dodd & Co. (寶順洋行) in Tamsui in 1864, and in 1865 he brought in the first fully commercial oolong plants from Anxi, Fujian. He persuaded farmers in Tamsui, Sanxia and Daxi to plant tea by advancing them loans and guaranteeing that he would buy the crop [1].

In 1868, Dodd and the Taiwanese comprador Li Chun-sheng (李春生) jointly founded Taiwan's first tea refining operation [1][2] — a date on which Chinese- and English-language scholarship agree, making it solid history. The refinery was originally meant for Bangka (艋舺, today's Wanhua), but rental disputes and local hostility pushed it to Dadaocheng (大稻埕) soon after [1]. From then on Dadaocheng replaced Bangka as the heart of the Taiwanese tea trade. Five major foreign firms moved in — Baoshun, Deji, Yiji, Shuilu and Heji — and at the peak more than 200 tea houses clustered there [1][8]. During the making season, male tea workers crossed from Xiamen to Dadaocheng for paid processing work, while Taiwanese women and girls plucked in the gardens and picked stems in the factories [2].

How big was tea? Three dated numbers · According to Customs reports, tea, sugar and camphor together accounted for about 94% of Taiwan's total export value between 1868 and 1895, with tea alone at 53.49% — the island's leading export in the late Qing [1][10]. · Using the 1866 Customs report as a baseline, oolong export volume grew tenfold by 1871, thirtyfold by 1875 and fiftyfold by 1877, and passed 100 times the baseline in 1892 [1][10]. · After that first shipment of 2,131 piculs went directly to New York in 1869, Formosa Oolong was hailed in the United States as the "champagne of teas," and America became Taiwan's largest export market for tea [1].

Where Did the Money Go? Northern Taiwan's Silver Puzzle

Exports exploded, and so did the cash. In a 2018 paper in the Economic History Review, the economic historian Kelly Olds reconstructed the financial side of the boom using customs silver flows and tens of thousands of old land deeds. Between 1880 and 1894, the value of imports into northern Taiwan was only two-thirds the value of exports; over the decade from 1885 to 1894, net silver inflows recorded by customs averaged more than 1.7 million silver dollars a year [2].

⚠️ A note on scale: Olds's figures for silver, interest rates and land prices cover northern Taiwan (the Tamsui and Keelung customs districts), a different scope from the island-wide export values in the Customs reports cited above. The two sets of numbers should not be mixed or compared directly [2].

What is striking is that people at the time could not account for the money either. In his 1881 trade report, Hancock, the customs commissioner at Tamsui, described tea farmers as steadily "coining money," yet admitted he had no idea where the millions of silver dollars flowing into the tea districts ended up [2]. Olds's answer: farmers hoarded the silver as cash and preferred saving to spending, producing a local glut of capital that lasted more than twenty years, pushing local interest rates down and land prices up [2]. He draws a larger conclusion too. The tea boom shifted Taiwan's economic center of gravity permanently from south to north, and the north has held that dominance ever since [2]. The ancestors of the cup in your hand helped build Taipei.

Act II: Under Japanese Rule, Black Tea Takes Over (1895–1945)

Taiwanese tea did not immediately flourish after the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. Squeezed by competition from British India, Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies, tea production largely stagnated once Japan took over, though tea remained one of northern Taiwan's main exports [2]. Only in the 1920s did oolong clearly decline, undercut by dumped Java tea and then the Great Depression, and hand over the leading role [1]. Slowing growth after 1895 and oolong losing its crown in the 1920s are two successive stages, not a contradiction.

What the colonial government did was industrialize and systematize tea making: research stations across the island, imported processing machinery, an export inspection regime, and tea training institutes [1]. Today's Tea and Beverage Research Station under the Ministry of Agriculture traces its origins to the Tea Manufacturing Experiment Station established in 1903 under the Government-General's Bureau of Productive Industries [3].

The black tea storyline opens in Yuchi (魚池), Nantou. In 1926 the tea experiment station introduced large-leaf Assam plants from India for trials there, on the strength of a climate close to that of the Assam growing region. In 1928 the Mitsui conglomerate bought modern processing machinery for large-scale production, and in the 1930s the tea was marketed in Britain and the United States under the Nittoh brand [1]. In 1936 the authorities set up a black tea experiment substation in Yuchi, the ancestor of today's Yuchi Branch of the Tea Research and Extension Station [3]. The Yuchi line kept growing after the war: using a Burmese large-leaf variety as the mother plant and Taiwanese wild mountain tea as the father, breeders produced TTES No. 18, Ruby, formally named in 1999 [4]. (For cultivar pedigrees, see our [official field guide to TTES No. 1–25](/articles?slug=ttes-full-registry) and [the cultivar history of Taiwanese oolong](/articles?slug=taiwan-oolong-cultivars); we will not repeat that ground here.)

Fate lent a hand in 1933. India, Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies signed the International Tea Restriction Agreement and cut production together. Japan was not invited and Taiwan was not bound, so Taiwanese black tea rushed into the gap: exports leapt from about 823,000 kilograms in 1933 to roughly 3,297,000 kilograms in 1934 [1].

Act III: Taiwan Was Once a Green Tea Export Power (1945–1970s)

The postwar script turned the page again. Japan's green tea regions were still recovering and the mainland Chinese market was closed, so Taiwan seized the opening. In 1948 the Xiehe trading firm (協和洋行) opened a Taiwan branch, hired Chinese tea makers and set up twelve factories in Hsinchu and Taoyuan to produce green tea; from the 1950s, close to a million kilograms a year went to North Africa [1]. Between 1954 and 1960 green and black tea shared the top export slots, and after 1961 green tea formally displaced black tea as the leading export, accounting for more than half the total [1]. In the 1970s, oil shocks drove up coffee prices and the Cultural Revolution interrupted Chinese exports, and Taiwanese tea exports held for a time at a high plateau of around 20 million kilograms [1].

Act IV: Exports Collapse, a High Mountain Kingdom Is Born (1979–)

After 1979, Taiwanese tea exports fell sharply [1]. The government's response was to turn inward: it supported dedicated production zones for premium tea and shared processing factories, launched fine tea competitions to stimulate domestic demand, and in 1981 announced the repeal of the Regulations for the Establishment of Tea Manufacturing Factories, freeing farmers to grow, process and sell their own tea [1]. Taiwan moved onto a small-and-medium-scale model in which one grower does all three, and the 1980s became the watershed for the whole industry [1].

A domestic market needs new stars. According to investigative reporting by News&Market and the recollections of growers it interviewed, the champion lot at the 1976 Lugu spring tea competition fetched an astonishing NT$5,000 per catty at a time when an entry-level civil servant earned about NT$1,200 a month; competition culture carried Dong Ding oolong to the peak of fame and price. Around 1987, new growing areas above 1,000 meters emerged, and their fine, high-toned liquor gradually replaced Dong Ding as the market's darling [7]. (The prices in this passage are oral recollections gathered by reporters, useful for atmosphere but not equivalent to customs statistics.) Yu Shuenn-Der, a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, notes that the high mountain style — lower oxidation, only a light roast, aroma foregrounded — was a process only fully developed in the early 1980s [6]. In other words, the fragrant high mountain oolong we now treat as the orthodox taste of Taiwan is a young tradition, less than fifty years old. (For how to choose one, see our [high mountain tea buying guide](/articles?slug=taiwan-high-mountain-tea-buying-guide); for why it tastes sweet, see [the theanine science behind high mountain tea](/articles?slug=high-mountain-theanine).)

Exports shrank, but they also moved upmarket. Volume at its lowest point was about a tenth of the peak, yet total export value climbed from under NT$100 million to more than NT$3 billion, with the average export price approaching NT$400 per kilogram [1]. Taiwan also shifted from pure exporter to both importer and exporter: total tea trade tipped into deficit around 1990 [1].

Myth Check: Which of These Stories Hold Up?

Taiwanese tea history is full of charming stories. Measured against official cultural institutions and academic research, several need cooling down:

❌ "Queen Victoria tasted it and named it Oriental Beauty" The Ministry of Culture's National Cultural Memory Bank states plainly that no formal document records Queen Victoria naming the tea, that Taiwanese oolong of that era went mainly to the United States rather than Britain, and that Japanese-language sources place the emergence of pengfeng tea somewhere after the 1920s. The royal naming story is most likely a piece of storytelling for the market [5]. As for the origin tale that a leafhopper infestation in Chiang Jui-chang's Beipu garden accidentally produced a honeyed tea in 1932, versions differ on dates and people, so it too can only be labeled a legend [5]. (For the actual science behind that honeyed aroma, see [where the honey note in Oriental Beauty comes from](/articles?slug=oriental-beauty-honey-aroma).) ❌ "Tea art is ancient" Research by Yu Shuenn-Der of Academia Sinica shows that the term "tea art" (茶藝) was coined by Taiwan's tea community between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s to mark out a style distinct from Japanese chado. It is an invented Taiwanese tradition, not an ancient inheritance [6]. ⚠️ "Ke Chao brought tea and started Taipei's tea history" The account comes from Lien Heng's General History of Taiwan, completed in 1918, roughly a century after the fact — traditional narrative rather than contemporaneous record — and the location is disputed between Ruifang and Wenshan. Cite it with "supposedly" attached [1][9].

Puncturing these stories takes nothing away from Taiwanese tea. The documented history is the better tale: a Scottish merchant and a Taiwanese comprador putting Formosa on New York shelves, a silver boom that rewrote Taipei's fortunes, and a policy pivot that produced a high mountain tea kingdom.

The Bottom of the Cup

References

  1. 何志峰、林浩鉅、何青儒（2021）。〈臺灣茶葉產業結構與經營模式的轉變〉。《北商學報》，第 37 期，頁 1–25。國立臺北商業大學。https://journal.ntub.edu.tw/var/file/52/1052/img/514692047.pdf
  2. Olds, K. B. (2018). The Taiwan tea boom—a financial glut. _Economic History Review_, 71(4), 1227–1248. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12657
  3. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場。〈關於本場：沿革〉。https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=1381
  4. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場。〈臺茶 18 號（紅玉）〉。https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=4689
  5. 文化部國家文化記憶庫。〈東方美人茶名稱之緣由〉。https://tcmb.culture.tw/zh-tw/detail?indexCode=Culture_Event&id=222611
  6. 中央研究院「研之有物」（余舜德研究員受訪）。〈茶金歲月後，臺灣茶文化出現哪些新創的傳統？〉。https://research.sinica.edu.tw/taiwan-tea-culture/
  7. 上下游新聞市集。〈消失的茶山 01：不敵高山茶受市場青睞，被打入冷宮的凍頂烏龍茶〉。https://www.newsmarket.com.tw/blog/122302/
  8. 國立臺灣歷史博物館線上典藏（John Dodd）https://the.nmth.gov.tw/nmth/en-us/Item/Detail/0dda5eb9-48e6-4a32-b241-a9ce4f415a09 ；台灣光華雜誌（大稻埕茶貿易）https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/en/Articles/Details?Guid=fe2a40d0-b75d-4e0a-a45e-1ba5220a381c
  9. 連橫（1918）。《臺灣通史·卷二十七·農業志》。（柯朝引茶敘述之原始出處；成書晚於事件約百年，屬傳統敘述）
  10. 林滿紅（1997）。《茶、糖、樟腦業與臺灣之社會經濟變遷（1860–1895）》。台北：聯經出版。
  11. Gardella, R. (1994). _Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757–1937_. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Teas mentioned