Ali Shan

The red train on the tea packet was not built for tea. In the early 1900s Japan took the mountain from the Tsou people for its cypress forest, cut the trees down, and laid a railway to carry the timber to the coast. Logging stopped in the 1960s. The railway stayed, and now it carries tourists instead.

Nobody grew tea on these slopes until the 1980s. They were thought too steep and too dangerous. A few small gardens proved otherwise.

This ground was orchard before, and plum trees still stand between the rows. Up here the air is cold and thin, the plant grows slowly and keeps its sugar. That is what reaches the cup. Soft, sweet, almost nothing sharp.