Muzha's Top Tieguanyin Goes to a Father-and-Daughter First
Zhang Ya-han won the special award at Taipei's 2026 spring Muzha Tieguanyin competition, a year after her father took the same prize, the first back-to-back father-daughter win. Her winning tea priced at NT$30,000 a catty and sold out the day results posted.
The benchmark lot of this spring's Muzha Tieguanyin has a name, and a story behind it: Zhang Ya-han, who took the special award at Taipei's 2026 spring competition a year after her father won the same prize, the first time a father and daughter have taken the top Muzha Tieguanyin honour in consecutive seasons.
The city announced the results on June 2. Zhang, 36, left a career as a volleyball referee to work part-time at her family's Zhang Rong-tai tea garden, and it was her tea that judges placed first among the special-award lots. The competition named 71 prize winners across five grades, with a further 140 teas taking commendation awards, 211 recognised lots in all.
The prize does more than settle bragging rights. It sets the price. Zhang's special-award Tieguanyin was released at NT$30,000 a catty, about ten times the NT$2,000 to NT$3,000 that ordinary Muzha Tieguanyin fetches, in a batch limited to 20 catties that sold out the day the results were posted. A winning lot at Muzha is a small, quickly exhausted thing, and the buyers who want it move fast.
Muzha Tieguanyin is the Taiwanese branch of the style, grown in the hills of Muzha and Maokong on the southern edge of Taipei and made from the true Tieguanyin bush. It is worked into a tightly rolled, heavily roasted oolong, darker and more mineral than the fragrant high-mountain teas and distinct from the lighter, greener Tieguanyin now common in its mainland Anxi homeland. The long charcoal roast is what gives the Muzha version its baked, ripe-fruit depth and the lingering aftertaste local drinkers call guanyin yun, the "rhyme" of the tea.
The Taipei contest is the showcase for that traditional roasted character, and a winning tea becomes the reference buyers reach for through the season. That the same family has now set the mark two years running, first the father, then the daughter, is the kind of continuity a craft built on roasting by hand tends to reward.
Sources: Taipei City Department of Economic Development, 2026 Spring Premium Tieguanyin Competition results; Nextapple, 「茶界奧斯卡獎」出爐！首見父女接力奪奬 鐵觀音價飆10倍.