Trilliant Industry

oolong tea competitions

Tea competitions have long history, and Taiwan might be the first country in the world to hold Oolong tea contests, which can be dated back to 1975.

refining work; picking stems away from finished teas.

After WWII, tea industry in TW was chartered; although tea plantations were owned by privates, only few licensed ones can operate factories. There was quite a long time that teas, bananas and sugar canes were foundations to get foreign exchanges, and tea was kind of luxury product for many civilians.

Since TW started to be an OEM island and the economic boosted up rapidly, and the export of teas was hurt and dropped seriously due to soaring wages. In order to accelerate tea industry (where there were still many labors in this sector), TW government lifted the factory ban and started hold tea competitions.

Via such competitions, teas were brought back to our eyesight and no longer that luxury. People started to gain more knowledge about tea (what they were, how they should taste like, benefits, etc), and prices of teas were also getting higher and higher due to the auction systems (teas were only sold by the organizer); followingly, we had about 20 years of golden era in TW.

A very important anchor of all these was the organizer. Tea Research & Extension Station (TRES) was the one in charge of TW tea industry, and TRES played an impartial role: (1) it was the governmental organization but not a profitable unit, neither a private company (2) personnels in charge were highly professional (in fact, they knew much more than regular people in tea business) (3) we had a cupping system (or say, evaluating matrix) lasting and improving for hundreds years.

tea competition arena nowadays.

So, no one ever complained about rankings due to the highly fairness from TRES. Although there are more and more competitions in these 15+ years held by private associates, for any serious tea drinkers and buyers, they don’t pay too much attentions to such contests, neither to winners’ teas due to the impartiality reasons. There are dozens (maybe more) competitions in TW every year, but only few of them are indeed prestigious, and they are all held by the government.