Last October I visited Taiwan for the first time – in search of great oolong tea, as well as to write a piece about the island for the travel pages of the Financial Times.

As it turned out, there was a lavish admixture of practical Buddhism, too, since the Taiwanese government saw fit to loan me King-pong Liu or Leo Liu as my guide and interlocutor on matters Taiwanese. Leo was an adherent of the Tzu Chi (Compassion Relief) Buddhist Foundation; indeed, he had edited the organisation’s magazine for over a decade between his first and his current spell of government service. Through Leo, I travelled to the organisation’s Hualien HQ and even met Chen Yen, its spiritual leader and founder: a signal honour, and one I recall daily whenever I open my little cupboard here in Adelaide, since she gave me a bracelet made of recycled television garbage fused into beads.

These possess an attractive pale green opalescence, and glow in the dark; normally, I came to learn later, such a bracelet is only given to adepts after many years’ service to the organisation. No one seemed sure why I had been honoured in this way, but it was suggested that she had seen something worthy of nurture in me, so I do my best to live up to any momentary spark of demi-enlightenment briefly visible to a Buddhist master on an October day in eastern Taiwan.

The recycling, by the way, is a vital component of Tzu Chi philosophy, as you will find out a little further into the following article, lightly edited from the FT original. The Tzu Chi motto might almost be ‘Just do it’: whatever helps the planet helps people, and providing practical help to those most in need of it is the organisation’s raison d’être. I can’t forget my visit to the Tzu Chi hospital in Hualien, since it involved my first half-hour in a place we will all, sooner or later, fetch up: the morgue. Tzu Chi members who find themselves close to death are encouraged to donate their bodies for medical research, organ transplant and so on.

I read the moving stories of some of them in poster form on the wall, and then we moved into an anti-chamber next to the refrigerated room containing the shelved bodies. You could see into this room, dimly. The bodies were wrapped in white, from head to toe; I remember a white curtain blowing gently to and fro in the cooling air. I am largely agnostic concerning any spiritual presence in the recently dead … or I thought I was. The truth, though, is that I have spent very little time (too little time; indeed no time at all) sitting next to the recently dead. And now I’m less confident than I was that the vital spark ceases with the final heartbeat. Think of the forest in winter, and the fall and decay of a million dead leaves, yet summer abides there, too, and the forest is full of the scent and spectre of its transformation. The dead are truly dead, but their spark flickers phosphorescently on in the living -- strangers included.

Any’ow, here’s the piece:

Xu Shih Wen, Oriental Beauty tea farmer near Tohfen, TaiwanTaiwan wears its history lightly. This noisy, cheerful island has every right to be nervously indisposed. The last century alone saw forty-five years of Japanese occupation, following which the final act of the Chinese civil war was branded into its landmass. Decades of heavily armed glowering at the proprietorial uncle across the strait, combined with forty years of internal martial law, has come seasoned with natural challenges. Late summer sees the island buffeted with typhoons (it took a heavier lashing than usual in autumn 2008). Every decade brings a couple of earthquakes. Meanwhile, the island has continually to reinvent its economic destiny. In my childhood, toys came from Taiwan. More recently, it produced half the world’s laptop computers. Whatever Taiwan does next, mainland China will be ready to match (sometimes with Taiwanese help).

What the mainland can never match, of course, are the sights, sounds and smells of the island itself, as well as those products (like its graceful, perfumed oolong teas: see below) whose connection with place of origin is so intimate as to be inimitable. Taiwan’s image as as an industrious offshore termite mound might be true of Taipei and the western coastal plain, but over half the island’s landmass is forested, and these forests often clothe mountain scenery of almost brutal grandeur.

These mountains are both geologically youthful and growing fast: their uplift rate of over 5 mm per year is one of the swiftest in the world. The tectonic forces concentrated in this collision zone, where the Philippine sea plate has spent the last nine million years sliding under the Eurasian continental plate, become almost palpable in the Taroko Gorge to the east of the country.

Tiansiang Convent, Taroko Gorge

Forget the somnolently serene perfection of mainland Chinese mountains such as those of Wuyishan; instead, this is a landscape of terrifying inhospitability. Taiwan’s cross-island highway, built in four heroic years between 1956 and 1960 (at a cost of 212 lives and 702 injuries), has been followed by a fifty-year war of attrition with nature; indeed the struggle has proved so unequal that the Taiwanese authorities have given up trying to keep some of its sections under repair.

Water slices like cheesewire through cliffs which sometimes reach 1200 m (3,937 ft). Rain, mist and spray from cascading tributaries nourish lithophytes such as the elegant, reed-like Arundo formosa which cling to the rock walls, while geological chance means that in recent times the hurtling river has cut and polished its way through lower-series rocks of pure marble, creating natural contours to rival, in abstraction, the sublime figurative chiselling of Bernini or Canova. A night spent at Tiansiang mid-way up the Gorge, close to the roar of the water, is both soothing yet disconcerting: your journey will have shown you how rockfalls constantly demolish sections of road, and the monstrous boulders which litter the watercourse could skittle effortlessly through buildings. Come morning, though, sunshine will have replaced the swirling cloud of late afternoon, revealing the grand, gilded Goddess of Mercy at the convent which lies above this mountain hamlet, while swallows dip and butterflies with wings like enamelled business cards dance about you.

If there’s no time to travel down the spectacular east of the island, then other mountains and other gorges are easily accessible from the west, too, whose length is now served with Jeeves-like efficiency by clean, spacious high-speed trains. Alishan may not be quite a spine-tingling as Taroko, but its scented, incense-wood forests are as hard to forget. An antique mountain railway curls its way through the trees – or it should do, though those tumbling boulders had closed it temporarily during my recent visit. Walks through the bird-haunted forest are restorative, and many of the island’s finest tea-gardens are found near Fenchihu within the Alishan National Park.

Mainland Chinese tend to marvel at the lippy outspokenness of Tiawanese political discourse in tv chat shows, but the difference which Westerners are most likely to notice about Taiwan compared with the mainland is the ubiquity of religious temples and figures, from the gleaming buddha-yards by the side of the motorway to Taipei’s Longshan Temple in the heart of the city. The tolerance inherent in most Eastern religions is underlined by the fact that many temples (like the well-used Longshan) are polyvalent, replete with fiercely hairy Taoist deities as well as smooth Buddhist ones.

The worshippers are often polyvalent, too, commingling Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian worship. Kilograms of burning incense chugs into the warm night air as those in the temple trace out texts in solemn books, chant, make offerings, prostrate themselves – or simply sit and chat. The practice of an engaged, pragmatic Humanistic Buddhism is Taiwan’s main spiritual gift to the world, exemplified, for example, by the extensive aid work accomplished by the Tzu Chi institution, founded by nun Cheng Yen in 1966 to ‘help the poor and educate the rich’. Cheng Yen met Catholic nuns that year at Pu Ming temple who gently criticised Buddhism as being overly contemplative and inadequately engaged; Tzu Chi (‘compassion relief’) was her response.

Even if your visit limits you to Taipei, there are still a number of ways to escape the frenzy of street life. The city is, perhaps surprisingly, well equipped with cycle paths: take the metro line to Zhuwei station for bike hire, and you can soon be spinning peacably enough along the Danshui river. There are a number of well-used hiking trails around the city, too, include a ‘tea pickers hiking trail’ at Zhinan; while Yangminshan, the moutainous zone which lies to the north of the city, is not only an extensive National Park in its own right, but seeps with hot springs, too.

I visited one of these on a Saturday night when the curling road up the moutain had turned into an informal scooter derby for every 19-year-old in the city. The infernal road was soon forgotten, though, in an ample, gently steaming, stone-lined bath of warm and not overly sulphurous water. The island may be sited on the Luzon arc section of the Ring of Fire, but one natural hazard Taiwan doesn’t have to deal with is volcanoes, its own set being long extinct. These waters, gurgling from the earth’s intestines, are the tranquil postscript.

Taiwan’s national tourism site www.go2taiwan.net is usefully detailed, and anyone planning to get out of Taipei and explore the countryside should consult the English-language section of the National Parks website at http://np.cpami.gov.tw/en. Taiwan-based EVA Air flies to London via Bangkok six times a week (www.evaair.com).

Ends

Taiwan’s teas
Tea Tasting in Taipei -- tea merchant Simon Tsai and Leo LiuTaiwan’s tea speciality is oolong: large leafed, gentle and soothing in flavour, but often astonishingly complex in aroma. Stylistically, oolong (sometimes ‘wu long’) stands midway between unoxidised green tea and oxidised black tea; it is, in other words, partially oxidized, and its degree of oxidation (called fermentation in tea parlance) is one of the main ways in which different oolongs are distinguished in Taiwan. The most lightly oxidized is Bao Zhong (sometimes labelled Paochong or Pouchong): elegant twists of pine-green leaf producing soft forest scents and a creamy flavour.

Dong Ding is a little more oxidised and rolled into loose balls in its processing; the best (from Lugu in Nantou County) hints at peach and passionfruit, and has a brighter, more focussed flavour than Bao Zhong. A local version of the rolled Chinese Tieguanyin (Iron Goddess) is popular and invigorating, though it doesn’t have the same mineral notes you find in the mainland original. High-Mountain Oolong, much of the best from Alishan and the less accessible Lishan, is the sweetest and juiciest of all the rolled Taiwanese oolongs: the high gardens are more mist-swathed than those lower down, and those conditions provide softness and mildness rather than strength.

Oriental BeautyFinest of all to my mind, though, is the great Oriental Beauty (though it has ten other names including White-Tip Oolong and Five-Colour Oolong). This is low-grown, warm-climate tea from between Maoli and Hsinchu, picked in midsummer once the garden has become infested with the green leaf-hopper (Jacobiasca formosana Paoli), which bites the bud and top leaves leaving traces of its saliva as it does so. (The tea museum in Pinlin says Oriental Beauty is ‘slurped by cicadas’.) This insect saliva, plus a much higher degree of oxidation as the tea is processed, creates what is described locally as a honey flavour. Fine Oriental Beauty is entrancingly perfumed (violet, lilac, citrus, osmanthus, peach skins) and floral, elegant, complex and supple in flavour. It makes a worthy rival to mainland China’s astonishing Phoenix Honey Orchid oolong.

Two outstanding Taipei tea shops are Wang De Chuan (with a tea house upstairs) at 1F, 14-1 Chang-Chun Road (02 2561 8738) and Geow Yong Tea Hong next door at 14 Chang-Chun Road (02 2502 0506). Fine Taiwan Oolong is available internationally by mail-order from the UK-based Jing Tea (www.jingtea.com).