Gold Leaf | Daxi Old Tea Factory — Where the Light Is Aimed at the Leaf

The second floor is where Luo Shan-mei has to prove she belongs. Gold Leaf sends her up to the withering floor as a young woman handed a tea master's job on a dying man's word, and the room does not care whose daughter she is. It is a raft of one hundred and fifty-one hinoki trusses over an open plank floor, and the only tool for the job is moving air.

The crew shot here for three days and used the factory's own withering nets as props, because nothing they built would have been better. That is the gift of Daxi. Almost nothing here is a set. The 1928 Jackson roller downstairs still turns and still makes tea. The wooden window frames upstairs still rotate on their pivots, and you are allowed to swing them — that is the entire technology, aiming the draught across the leaf until the moisture leaves at the rate you want. Growers have been steering wind through this room since 1926.

The building is painted one colour throughout, a blue-grey the factory named after the town: Daxi blue. It is chalky. It is flaking off the beams. Nobody has touched it up. A stone plaque set into the wall marks the 1959 rebuild, after fire took the factory and Chiang Kai-shek, driving past on the road up to his villa at Jiaobanshan, ordered army engineers to put it back.

Staff say visitors rose about thirty percent after the finale aired, and that people now come in and ask, before anything else, where Shan-mei made her tea. Go upstairs. Turn one window on its pivot. The air crosses a hundred feet of empty floor, and you feel the temperature of it change on the back of your hand.

Location data: Taiwan Tourism Administration and the factory's own site (daxitea.com). Open daily 09:30–17:00, NT$150 admission.