Experience and marketing
Denise Shih, Hugosum’s general manager, stands next to a 60-year-old Assam tea bush. A Sun Moon Lake native who was one of the key drivers behind the upscaling of the area’s black tea industry and turning tea processors into tea estates, Shih recalls the industry struggling with poor sales when she returned home in 2005.
The decline was related to a larger decline in Taiwan’s black tea industry as a whole. Her father, Shi Chaoxing, who was a master tea maker and later the manager at Taiwan Tea Corporation’s Mochiki Tea Factory, lived through the industry’s highs and lows.
“Taiwanese didn’t drink black tea in my father’s day. It was an export product. At the local industry’s peak, the Sun Moon Lake area had roughly 1,700 hectares in cultivation. But when I got into the business, Taiwanese black tea exports were at a low ebb. According to official figures, Yuchi Township was down to just 100 hectares of black tea.”
When 1999’s Jiji Earthquake badly damaged the Sun Moon Lake area, the Small and Medium Enterprise Administration of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Yuchi Township’s mayor worked hard to prop up the black tea industry and turn it into a local specialty industry. Meanwhile, the Tea Research and Extension Station introduced the “Taiwanese style” Taiwan Teas Nos. 18, 21, and 23, providing new flavors of black tea. With local growers also moving to hand picking of flushes, Sun Moon Lake tea had the opportunity to transform from a mass-market commercial product to a high-end tea.
A grateful Denise Shih says, “We jumped on the bandwagon, using it to revamp and upgrade our products.” With Sun Moon Lake’s recovery from the earthquake, Yuchi Township’s land in black tea cultivation has grown to between 600 and 700 hectares.
Denise Shih (left), Hugosam’s general manager, and its president, Steve Chen (right), were key drivers behind the upscaling of Sun Moon Lake’s black tea industry and the transformation of its tea processors into tea estates. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)