Photos: Taiwan’s tea revival blends ancient terraces with new climate adaptations

TAIPEI, 13 OCTOBER 2026 —

Ten kilometers east of Taipei’s high-rises and dense traffic, the city gives way to a succession of steep, forested ridgelines sheltering villages in the valleys below. The subtropical mist that cloaks these slopes at dawn has already thinned, and by 9 a.m. the heat is climbing.

Rounding a bend, he stops at an opening in the brush. Half the hillside before him is covered in dark-green ribbons, the regular corduroy of cultivated land. The other half looks like something took a bite out of it.

For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tea made these hills valuable. By 1897, tea accounted for 22 percent of Taiwan’s export earnings, four times the value of sugar, with 96 percent of the island’s Formosa oolong sailing for New York and Chicago. Shenkeng’s own signature style, the lightly oxidized Wenshan pouchong, came on the scene around 1912 and was refined through the 1920s, becoming Taiwan’s leading export to Southeast Asia.

By the 1970s, industrialization and urbanization hollowed out the trade, and the local industry shifted to tofu production, allowing the jungle to reclaim the tea farms. Now, a government-backed revitalization effort is underway to bring tea production, and its associated cultural heritage, back to the region, even as the weather patterns that once made Shenkeng ideal for growing it become less reliable due to climate change.

Morning mists that once kept slopes damp now burn off earlier in the day, drying soils and stressing plant roots. Rainfall, while still adequate overall, increasingly arrives in short, intense bursts rather than the steady drizzle tea plants prefer. The bigger threat comes from typhoons, with researchers finding that storm intensity in the region has increased by 12 to 15 percent, and category 4 and 5 storms doubling or even tripling in frequency this century.

In 2025 alone, typhoons caused more than NT$1 billion, roughly $31.3 million, in losses.

In response to these challenges, Li has joined Preserving Legacies, an initiative funded by the National Geographic Society focused on helping culturally significant sites create locally led climate impact and adaptation assessments. That process, culminating in an executive summary of the assessment published in September 2026, has yielded a few novel solutions.

Researchers in Li’s design department have studied the stone terrace walls built by earlier generations of farmers and found them remarkably effective at channeling water away from slopes while holding soil in place. Rather than replace that design, restoration crews are rebuilding it, reinforced with drip irrigation systems tied to soil-moisture sensors that keep hillsides consistently damp and heavy, reducing the risk that roots will be torn loose by high winds.

Workers are also mulching bare soil with fallen leaves for added moisture retention and weight, planting drought-resistant and slope-stabilizing species such as the Taiwan crepe myrtle and acacia, and testing more resilient tea cultivars, including TTES #12 Jin Xuan and TTES #23 Qi Yun.

Monitoring has gone digital as well, with researchers experimenting with satellite imagery to flag slope movement before it becomes a landslide, and Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction has built a 3D Disaster Potential Map app that lets farmers see which sections of their own hillsides are at highest risk.

That future will take time, as tea bushes reach their best-quality leaf production between 5 and 30 years of age, meaning the terraces now being replanted won’t show their full worth for a generation. For Li, the urgency is worth the wait, with tea remaining the most popular drink in the world after water.

Related: China University of Technology · Li Chao-shiang · Taipei