Ancient tea traditions unite families across the Strait

Standing amid the rolling tea terraces of Yongfu town, Fujian province, Taiwan businessman Lee Chih-hung gently rubs a tender spring tea bud between his fingers. As pink cherry blossoms blanket the hillsides in the early spring, Lee's plantation prepares for the year's busiest harvest season.

This land is widely celebrated as the "Alishan Mountain on the Chinese mainland", serving as a geographical and cultural mirror image of Taiwan's iconic tea-growing region. Beyond its striking resemblance in climate and altitude, it is a shared cradle nurtured by farmers from both sides of the Strait.

Lee carved out his venture on a barren mountain, using high-mountain tea as a link to integrate Taiwan's exquisite agricultural craftsmanship with the vitalization opportunities on the mainland. Yongfu has since evolved into a premier cluster for Taiwan-funded agriculture, currently hosting 86 tea enterprises cultivating over 3,300 hectares of oolong tea.

For Lee, this 22-year effort is a profound journey of ancestral return. His family's lineage was rooted in Yongfu for generations before his father moved to Taiwan for business in 1947. Due to decades of cross-Strait isolation, his father could never return to care for his parents — a regret that became his deepest pain.

When exchanges finally opened in the late 1980s, Lee's father immediately brought him back to Yongfu, only to find his parents had already passed away. Lee vividly recalled his family in the mainland sharing a memory of Lee's grandmother,"Whenever she missed her son in Taiwan, she would place his clothes on a chair while worshiping the ancestors, praying for his safety."

Hearing this, Lee's father burst into tears and knelt in grief for a long time, repeatedly apologizing to the family he had left behind. Standing by his side, Lee felt a profound responsibility to mend the broken connection of his father's generation.

In 2004, inspired by the pioneering work of early Taiwan tea farmer Hsieh Tung-ching, he decided to learn tea planting from scratch.

Lee pioneered a unique irrigation method using fermented soybean milk enriched with probiotics to improve tea quality while recycling residue as organic fertilizer. This commitment to "exquisite agriculture" led his brand to be selected for the 2017 BRICS Xiamen Summit and become an official gift for the Palace Museum.

Supported by mainland policies — including financial subsidies and discounted electricity — his business flourished into a national cross-Strait ecological benchmark.

Lee has actively shared his exquisite agricultural techniques with neighboring farmers. His plantation and processing plant provide year-round jobs for local villagers. During peak harvest seasons, he employs 400 to 500 seasonal workers for over 100 days each year.

As president of the Zhangping Taiwan Businessmen Association, Lee also tackled a critical industry bottleneck: the lack of unified agricultural standards. Previously, the absence of a clear regulatory framework meant that tea produced by Taiwan farmers often lacked a formal market identity. To bridge this gap, Lee collaborated with experts to standardize the entire process from soil to cup.

In 2021, two national standards for "Taiwan-style Oolong Tea" were implemented, providing a robust regulatory shield. The results were transformative, with production in Zhangping surging to 3,300 metric tons — reflecting a remarkable growth of over 110 percent by the second year of implementation.

To put these standards into practice, Lee helped organize a cross-Strait oolong tea competition last year. The event attracted hundreds of participants and served as a pioneering platform where masters from both sides competed, with these national standards as the sole evaluation criteria.

"The main tea varieties in Taiwan originally evolved from the tea of Fujian," Lee said. "After generations of refinement in Taiwan, we have brought these roots back to Yongfu."

He believes that harmonizing standards is the cornerstone of integration, leading to shared brands and markets.

"While the two sides are not yet unified, we can let the tea leaves find common ground first," Lee said.

Ding Ziyan contributed to this story.