“Relying on Heaven” 63the market are entwined in this fashion, each tea maker’s personal style becomes a
marketable quality precisely to the extent that his or her tea—as material, taste, and
envoy of the more-than-human world—can be made to speak for itself.
Notes
1 For a description and analysis of representations of “natural farming” and “eco-tea” in
Taiwanese lifestyle media, see Writer (2013).
2 This fieldwork was supported by a Taiwan Fellowship granted by Taiwan’s Ministry
of Foreign Affairs.
3 All of the names used for my informants are pseudonyms. For names of informants
and in citations I have used the pinyin system of Romanization, except where authors
have an existing usage. Place names are rendered following the most commonly used
convention (for example, Hsinchu rather than Xinzhu).
4 This is a transliteration into Chinese characters of a Hakka word, pronounced chog-
rhan in the Hailu-dialect spoken in Beipu. Hoklo speakers in Taiwan use the term「
蜒仔」iân-á.
5 Unsurprisingly, opinions varied among tea farmers as to how zealously such
prohibitions needed to be observed. For example, some farmers I spoke with would
admit to the use of organic fertilizers at certain points in the tea plant life-cycle and
certain times of the year (typically those most distant from tea-picking seasons).
6 Thus it is not unusual to see more recently developed lines of “eco-tea” packaged for
sale using descriptors such as “honey-fragrance oolong” or “honey-fragrance black
tea” in order to link their tea with the “honey fragrance” most commonly identified
with Oriental Beauty.
7 The word tianshi 天時 can simply mean “the seasons,” but I am here following the
translation of Farquhar and Zhang (2012, p. 164) to emphasize the intensive and
affective aspect immanent to the concept of seasonality itself.
8 More precisely, oolong teas such as Oriental Beauty can be defined as a style of
partially-oxidised tea, in contrast to, among others, non-oxidized “green” tea (綠茶
lü cha) and fully-oxidized “red” tea (紅茶 hong cha, which is known in English as
“black tea”). However, for historical reasons, in Taiwan it is most common to refer to
the oxidation reaction as “fermentation.”
9 My analysis here is aligned with Farquhar and Zhang’s analysis of “originary qi”
元氣 in traditional Chinese medicine: “Originary qi is a kind of theoretical object,
but it expresses only as particular forms, and these forms are always undergoing
transformation” (Farquhar and Zhang 2010, p. 276).
10 This conception of a tea’s “essence” dovetails neatly with the classical Chinese concept
of 性 xing, or an entity’s “nature” or defining character. Angus Graham notes of this
concept that “xing will be spontaneous process with a direction continually modified
by the effects on it of deliberate action” (Quoted in Hall and Ames 2001, p. 28).
11 To think of tea making this way thus dovetails with the sense with which “feeling” (感
gan) has been employed recently by Sinophone scholars investigating the historically
and culturally situated relationships between the senses, the body, and culture, or what
they call 身體感 shentigan (Yu 2008). I follow Elisabeth Hsu’s elegant translation of
this term as “bodily resonances” (Hsu 2008).
12 This quote is drawn from Roger Ames’s definition of the Chinese word勢shi, a term
that captures some of the complexity of the tea-making experience. He translates it as
“situationality”: “at once ‘situation,’ ‘momentum,’ and ‘manipulation.’ Shi includes
all of the conditions that collaborate to produce a particular situation, including place,
agencies, and actions” (Ames 1998, p. 227).
13 Lin is here referring to the biannual “Fine tea competitions” held across Taiwan, which
he—and several other Beipu farmers—identifies as the major factor encouraging