John Dodd Gets the Credit for Formosa Oolong; Li Chunsheng Did Half the Work
In 1869 a Scottish trader shipped the first Taiwanese tea to reach New York under its own name, and it sold as "Formosa Oolong," a brand that outlived the man, the shipment, and eventually the export trade itself. The Chinese comprador who built the operation beside him rarely makes the English version of the story.
In 1869, a Scottish trader named John Dodd loaded two sailing ships at the northern Taiwanese port of Tamsui with tea grown in the hills above what is now Taipei, and sent them to New York. The cargo came to roughly 128 tons, the figure most accounts give, though some run higher. No American importer had ordered anything like it before, because no American importer had had the chance: Taiwan-grown tea had never crossed the Pacific on its own account. Within the year it was selling briskly under a name Dodd is credited with putting on the label, Formosa Oolong, and it did not stop selling for the rest of the century.
A trade that did not exist a decade earlier
Dodd had no tea background when he arrived. He came to Taiwan in 1860 to scout camphor, the crystalline compound distilled from the camphor laurel, then valued mainly in medicine and for protecting cloth from moths, and settled permanently at Tamsui in 1864 as an agent for the British firm Dent and Company. The port had opened to foreign trade only in 1862, under the treaty settlement that followed the Second Opium War, and Dodd was one of the handful of Western merchants working it (StoryStudio).
What changed his business was a chance find. Touring the hills near Tamsui for camphor stands, Dodd saw farmers already growing tea, a crop introduced from Fujian generations earlier but never organized for export. He bought samples, sold them at a profit in Macao, and by the mid-1860s had founded his own trading house, Dodd and Company, to chase the opportunity directly. In 1868, that house became something more specific: Taiwan's first tea manufacturing business, set up so the leaf could be finished on the island instead of shipped semi-processed to Amoy, on the mainland, the way local farmers had been selling it for years (Olds).
The comprador the English record leaves out
Running that 1868 manufacturing business took a partner who could operate on both sides of the language line, and this is where the story English-language tea histories tell and the story Chinese-language sources tell start to diverge. Li Chunsheng, a merchant from Xiamen, was Dodd's comprador, the on-the-ground manager who ran the Taiwan side of the business, and by the economic historian Kelly Olds's account1 the two of them set up that first manufacturing business together (Olds; Global Views Monthly). English accounts mention Li rarely, if at all, and credit Dodd alone, often calling him the father of Taiwan oolong. Taiwanese and Chinese-language sources tell a fuller version: Li sourced superior tea seedlings and cuttings from Anxi in Fujian, arranged credit for Taiwanese farmers who had no capital to plant on faith, personally trained them in cultivation and processing, and recruited tea masters from Fuzhou to bring the finished leaf up to export grade (Global Views Monthly). He expanded the growing area from the Wenshan hills to Qixing, Jilong, and Haishan, well past what Dodd could have organized working through an interpreter.
Li went on to build his own fortune from the trade, in oil imports, Dadaocheng real estate, and railway investment, and became Taiwan's second-wealthiest man of his generation, behind only the Lin family of Banqiao (Global Views Monthly). The English-language histories that credit Dodd with Formosa Oolong rarely mention any of it.
The silver flowed in; explaining where it went stumped everyone
The original processing shop sat in Bangka (modern Wanhua), but local hostility toward the foreign operation pushed Dodd and Li to relocate it to Dadaocheng, on the Tamsui River a short distance north, in 1869, the same year the first ships sailed. Dadaocheng stayed the center of Taiwan's tea trade for the next century.
The shipment's effect on Taiwan itself was financial before it was cultural. Tea already accounted for more than half the value of everything northern Taiwan exported by 1871, and the silver used to pay for it kept arriving for two more decades: customs figures put the net inflow at over 1.7 million silver dollars a year through the whole 1885 to 1894 decade, an amount equal to more than 5 percent of all the currency and demand deposits held across the island's entire private sector as late as 1912 (Olds). Interest rates on farm loans in the tea districts fell as the money piled up, and land prices in the Taipei area climbed through the 1880s.
What the money did once it reached the farmers puzzled the merchants moving it. William Hancock, the British trade official who filed Tamsui's 1881 Trade Report, wrote plainly that he could not account for it: "The planters are steadily coining money, and it is difficult to know what has become of the millions of dollars that have been poured into the narrow slip of country called the Tea districts... Their receipts year after year are enormous, and yet they show no signs of wealth easily acquired" (quoted in Olds). A tea economist working from the surviving loan and land-sale contracts more than a century later found the likely answer: growers were not spending the windfall, they were hoarding it as silver, since nineteenth-century Taiwan had no banks that would take a farmer's deposit and lend it back out at a return (Olds).
Selling a Chinese tea under a Portuguese name most Americans barely knew
"Formosa" was not Dodd's invention. Portuguese sailors had named the island in the 1500s, and by the 1860s it still meant almost nothing to an American tea drinker beyond an unfamiliar word on a crate. Dodd built a brand on it anyway, and the branding stuck. A poster in the New-York Historical Society's collection, reproduced from an 1886 trade text called Tea and Tea Blending, calls Formosa Oolong "the prince of flavouring teas," aimed squarely at buyers who wanted a specific, namable style rather than generic "China tea" (New-York Historical Society).
That specificity mattered because it was competing against a coordinated pitch from the other side of the tea world. British interests developing plantations in Assam and then Ceylon spent the same decades telling Western buyers that Empire tea was safer than anything grown under Chinese-style smallholder methods: supervised by European managers, and therefore "free of the types of unhealthy adulterants" the same marketing claimed lurked in Chinese-grown leaf (Rappaport). Formosa Oolong had to sell on its own distinct identity to survive that pressure, and for a few decades it did. By the 1880s Taiwan's tea exports had grown from about 180,000 pounds in 1865 to more than 16 million pounds, tea had become the island's leading export, and more than 200 merchant houses were operating out of Dadaocheng at the trade's peak (Taiwan Panorama; Chai House).
Later exporters carried the same name further than Dodd ever had. Chen Tianlai, who founded the Jinji Tea Company in Dadaocheng in 1891, pushed Formosa Tea into Southeast Asia and organized Taiwan's presence at the 1935 Taiwan Exposition specifically to keep the "Formosa Tea" and "Oolong Tea" names in front of international buyers (Global Views Monthly). By the account historians give, the brand eventually reached tea drinkers in more than fifty countries, all trading on a place-name coined by sailors who never tasted the tea grown there.
What "Formosa Oolong" meant commercially, and what it did not
Formosa Oolong was never one fixed recipe. It was a marketing category covering the heavily oxidized, closer-to-black-tea styles Taiwan shipped west, most famously what is sold today as Oriental Beauty or Bai Hao oolong. A popular version of that tea's own origin story has Britain's Queen Victoria naming it after admiring the color of the steeped leaf. This site's own reporting on Oriental Beauty's chemistry has already flagged that story as legend tea writers repeat without a document behind it, while the real, dated 1869 shipment is the part of the history that actually happened (see the leafhopper chemistry behind Oriental Beauty). The commercial reality mattered more than the royal anecdote: buyers in Boston and New York wanted a heavier, darker cup than the mainland oolong already reaching them, blended through Amoy with leaf from the older Anxi gardens, and Taiwan's growers, working the Fujian method at a lighter roast but a longer oxidation, could supply exactly that at a competitive price (Olds).
The identity that outlived the trade that built it
The export trade Dodd and Li started did not last as the dominant force in Taiwan's tea economy. Japan's colonial administration, which took control of Taiwan in 1895, invested heavily in modernizing tea processing and enforced strict export-quality inspections, and Taiwanese tea kept collecting awards at international expositions through the occupation (StoryStudio). After the Republic of China took over in 1945, production swung back toward green tea for export, and for much of the mid-twentieth century Taiwan operated as a middle link supplying other countries' tea blends rather than as the source of a name-brand product in its own right (Chai House; StoryStudio).
The end came from economics, not politics. Through the late twentieth century, cheaper leaf from other producers eroded Taiwan's position in the export markets it had once dominated, the business climate around the trade changed, and in 1982 the government dropped the regulatory framework that had kept large merchant houses at the center of the trade (Taiwan Panorama). Small farmers began processing their own leaf, and the merchant class that had run Formosa Oolong's marketing for a century lost its reason to exist; some of Dadaocheng's oldest tea houses closed for good in the decades after, one as late as 2004 (Taiwan Panorama). Taiwan's growers turned inward, toward the high-altitude gaoshan oolongs prized today mostly by drinkers on the island itself and by a smaller, specialist export trade abroad, not by the mass American market Dodd once supplied (see how gaoshan is grown, and regulated, today).
"Formosa Oolong" itself never fully disappeared from Western shelves; specialty tea sellers still stock it as a style name. But the brand a Scottish trader and a Xiamen-born comprador built to move 128 tons of unfamiliar leaf now describes a niche, not the tea that once made Taipei's fortune. For where this export era sits in the longer history of the category, from Fujian's own disputed invention to Taiwan's migration in the first place, see The History of Oolong.