Touring Tainan : The oldest tea shop in Taiwan

It makes sense that the oldest tea shop in Taiwan would be in Tainan – the oldest city in Taiwan. A Chinese exchange student friend took me to a place I would otherwise probably never know about – a 5 (or was it 6) generations running family tea-shop in Tainan.

Welcoming us in his pajamas was someone who looked as old as the tea-shop – an unbelievably cute Taiwanese who’s running the place.

He was a very curious guy, asking us a lot of question and was especially interested to learn things about me, even my possible romantic relationship with the friend. I loved it when before leaving, after being explained I live in the west side and she lives in the east side, he asked – “oh, so you don’t live together?”. After hearing that “we’re not together” he asked “but why you don’t live together?”.

Okay… to the art of tea, which I know absolutely nothing about. You may have noticed that he carries his tea in some very very old cases, which contain some exotic highly-priced tea from all over. He put out some for us, going from 50 to a 100NT$ per “Liang” Taiwanese measure (which isn’t a lot).

So, what kind of tea do you have? :

Sweet guy, right? He kind’o takes pleasure in doing things slowly and thoroughly. Like packaging our tea for us while I was trying to figure out how someone can know about this place :

So, where is it? 137 Mingchuan road, sec 1. Go pay him a visit.