Two Anxi Migrations Planted Taipei's Rival Tieguanyin and Pouchong, a Decade Apart

In 1895, a twenty-year-old tea farmer named Zhang Naimiao went home to Anxi county in Fujian to burn incense for his ancestors, and came back to Taiwan with a dozen tea saplings wrapped for the crossing. He planted them in a bed cut into a crack in the rock behind his house, on a mountainside outside Taipei that had never grown this tea before. Whether that first planting even survived is not entirely clear from the record. What happened next is: within a generation, that mountainside, now called Muzha, had a resident population dominated, by local accounts, by a single surname, Zhang, and had become the source of Taiwan's own Tieguanyin, the rolled, iron-heavy oolong first made in the county Naimiao had just left.

Muzha is only half the story. A few miles further into the same hills, a second and entirely separate wave of Anxi arrivals, landing about a decade earlier, founded Taiwan's other great Fujian-style tea line: Wenshan pouchong, a wrapped, barely rolled tea that shares almost nothing in appearance with Tieguanyin despite starting from the same home county. Two migrations, a few miles and roughly ten years apart, planted two different processing philosophies in the same river basin, and the people who did it left names, dates, and disagreeing numbers behind them.

A dozen saplings and a crack in the rock

Zhang Naimiao's own household story is well kept, and it does not fully agree with itself on quantities. By one English-language account of the family's history, his 1895 trip brought back "just over ten" saplings; by another, it was twelve, and he was twenty years old at the time. A Chinese-language Taipei tourism guide³ independently dates the same trip to "the 21st year of the Guangxu reign," which converts to 1895, and adds a detail neither English source carries: the tea's arrival is why most of Zhanghu, the specific stretch of Muzha mountain he settled, ended up populated by his own clan.

He went back the following year for more stock. Here the record disagrees by a full order of magnitude: one source puts the 1896 haul at roughly 100 seedlings, the other at 1,000. Neither is a rounding error away from the other, and nothing in either account explains the gap. What both agree on is the shape of what came next: a working plantation, cut behind Naimiao's own house, that held for over two decades before Muzha's tea business scaled into something bigger than one family's garden.

That scale-up came in 1919, organized through a Muzha tea growers' cooperative under a local figure named Zhang Futang. He commissioned Naimiao, together with his brother Zhang Naiqian, to return to Anxi and its neighboring counties one more time for purebred stock, specifically the Hongxin Waiwei Tao subvariety, "red heart, crooked tail peach," judged the best of what Anxi grew. The two accounts again disagree on how much came back, 300 seedlings by one telling, 3,000 by the other. They also disagree on whether Naiqian survived the trip. One family history (Umi Tea Sets) reports that he fell ill and died on the crossing back to Taiwan; the other carries no death account at all.

The plant Naimiao kept carrying already had its own disputed origin, a farmer's dream of the bodhisattva Guanyin credited to a man named Wei Yin some 170 years earlier in Anxi, a legend this publication has already weighed against the documentary record and found wanting on its own terms (see Tieguanyin's founding legends). Naimiao's crossing to Taiwan is a separate, later, and considerably better documented event: real trip dates, a real clan, and a real plantation that outlived every person involved in planting it.

It also kept extending itself. In 1995, on the hundredth anniversary of that first 1895 trip, Naimiao's descendants opened a memorial hall in Muzha in his name, still open for guided visits today. And the family's imprint on Taiwanese tea did not stop with Tieguanyin: in 1985, a Muzha grower most commonly identified as Naimiao's own grandson found a chance bud mutation on an old bush while cutting firewood on the hillside behind his tea garden, a hardy new line that budded almost year round. Locals still call it "Hui-zai tea," after the grower's name; the rest of Taiwan knows it as Siji Chun, four-seasons spring, now one of the island's most widely planted cultivars, grown well past Muzha's own borders.

Two rival methods, from the camphor trade

Wenshan pouchong's founding runs on an entirely separate timeline and an entirely separate pair of names. Its production method, wrapping the finished, twisted leaf flat in sheets of coarse paper stamped with the maker's shop name, was invented in Anxi by a maker named Wang Yicheng. It reached Taiwan in 1881, when Wu Fulao (吳福老) brought Wang's method to the island, according to Taiwan's own government Tea and Beverage Research Station. The Chinese term for the resulting tea, bao zhong, means simply "wrapped kind," a name that describes the packaging, not the leaf inside it.

The men who actually built the district around that method arrived about four years later, and they were not tea growers to start with. Wang Shuijin and Wei Jingshi, both from Anxi, had been working the camphor trade, the same declining resin business that had first drawn a Scottish merchant into Taiwan's tea business a generation earlier, in these same northern hills (see how camphor pushed John Dodd into tea). Around 1885, with camphor no longer paying, the two men resettled in Nankang, in the hills east of Muzha, and turned to the crop that was. Naimiao would not make his own first planting, a few miles west, for another decade.

They did not agree on how to make it. Wang adapted the older Wuyi-style method he already knew, producing a tea with a deeper, reddish liquor he marketed as the "Wenshan style." Wei went the other way, dropping the flower-scenting step altogether and developing what growers called the "Nankang style," a lighter, unscented tea that turned out fragrant on its own. Wei's unscented version carried the market. It took the top award at a Japanese trade exhibition in 1909, and in 1916 a Japanese colonial-government survey named both Wei's Nankang method and Wang's improved Wenshan method the best tea-manufacturing methods of the day. Wei became the first working tea farmer in Taiwan appointed as a government tea-manufacturing instructor, a post he used to teach his method island-wide. One Taiwanese tea history calls his unscented Nankang style the "mother technique" (母法) behind most of modern Taiwanese tea-making.

From that base in Nankang, the tea spread through the wider Wenshan district, Shiding, Pinglin, Shenkeng, and Xindian, and into Muzha too, the same hills Naimiao's Tieguanyin was already occupying under a different name. Pinglin grew into the largest single pouchong-producing district in Taiwan, and it still accounts for most of the island's pouchong.

Same county, same decade, opposite tea

The two lineages describe a real divergence rather than a coincidence of geography. Tieguanyin sits in the medium range of oxidation, roughly 25 to 60 percent by this publication's own accounting (see what oxidation and roast actually decide), rolled tight and often finished with a roast, built to concentrate a heavier, mineral character close to its Wuyi-adjacent Anxi original. Pouchong sits at the opposite floor, 8 to 12 percent, left in loose twisted strips rather than rolled, built by Wei Jingshi specifically to strip processing back to almost nothing, so nothing masked the leaf's own floral character.

Read against that, the regions guide's own summary line, that "tea makers from Anxi carried the Fujian oolong method across to northern Taiwan" in the 19th century, is accurate as far as it goes and considerably flatter than what actually happened. It was not one method carried once. It was at least two, planted by different named people in different years a short distance apart, one of them itself the product of an internal argument between two migrants who could not agree on how much processing a leaf actually needed.

The seedling counts still do not add up between sources, and probably never will; nobody was keeping an export ledger for a farmer's private planting behind his own house. The years, the names, and the outcome are not in dispute. Two groups of Anxi migrants, working the same hills within about a decade of each other, built two tea traditions that still do not taste anything alike, and both are still standing. For where this migration sits in the longer history of the category, and what happened to Taiwan's oolong once it reached the export market, see The History of Oolong.