Pinglin Tea Plantation Tour: Terraces, a Reservoir and a Pot of Baozhong

Thousand Island Lake and the Bagua terraces

The lake is not a lake but the flooded catchment of the Feitsui Reservoir, where drowned ridgelines break the surface as dozens of small islands. It supplies Taipei's drinking water, which is why there are no boats on it and why the hillsides above are farmed rather than built on.

The Bagua Tea Garden sits on the ridge over the water, its rows planted in curving bands that read from above like the trigram symbols the name refers to. The viewing platform is free and the photograph everyone comes for is taken from it. On the tour it is a 25-minute stop; on your own it is a two to three-hour walk from the bus stop and back.

The museum and the tasting

The Pinglin Tea Museum is a Fujian-style courtyard house with Jiangnan gardens, and NT$80 gets you the harvesting tools, the rolling and roasting equipment, and the history of how a mountain village became a tea town. It is small and better than it needs to be.

Afterwards the tour visits a working tea shop where an instructor walks the group through brewing Wenshan Baozhong: water temperature, first rinse, steep times, and why the second infusion tastes different from the first. Tastings are included. The tea you buy afterwards is not, and most people buy some.

MRT, then a bus into the hills

Pinglin lies southeast of Taipei on the far side of the ridge, in the reservoir catchment. There is no rail line; the public route ends with a mountain bus.

• MRT green line to Xindian, about 23 minutes from Taipei Main Station.
• From the Xindian bus terminal, take bus 923 or GR12 to Pinglin, roughly an hour on a twisting road.
• Buses are hourly rather than frequent, so check the return time before you walk anywhere.
• The Bagua terrace viewpoint is a separate walk from Pinglin town, and taxis in the area are scarce.
• YouBike docks in Pinglin let you ride the riverside trail without walking the whole valley.

Which version to choose

The independent trip is cheap and unhurried, and it is the better one if you want to sit in a tea house for two hours or walk the fish-watching trail along the river. It costs a full day, because the bus timetable rather than the distance sets the pace.

The tour costs $49.46 and returns you to central Taipei in five hours, with the tasting arranged and the terraces reached by road rather than on foot. Per hour it is more expensive than the coast day trips and covers less ground. Book it for a slow second half of a day, not as a substitute for the the other Taipei tours.

Wenshan Baozhong

Baozhong is a lightly oxidised oolong, closer to a green tea than to the roasted high-mountain oolongs most visitors know, with a floral, almost lily-like character. The Wenshan area, of which Pinglin is the heart, produces most of Taiwan's supply, helped by the humidity that hangs over the reservoir.

The other name you will see is Dong Fang Mei Ren, Oriental Beauty, an oxidised oolong made from leaves bitten by a small leafhopper, which is what gives it the honeyed taste. It grows in the same hills and costs considerably more.

Harvest windows

Late March to May and September to October are the harvest periods, when the bushes are at their fullest and the shops are selling the current season's leaf. Between harvests the terraces still photograph well but the fields are quieter.

Come on a weekday if you can. Pinglin is a Taipei weekend destination for tea buying, and the single road through the town gets busy on Saturdays.