Gold Leaf | Taitung Tea Research Station — The Darjeeling of 1949

The first shots of the series are not in Taiwan. They are in Darjeeling in 1949, where KK is saying goodbye to the tea farmers he has worked beside, riding out on the back of a truck with pickers standing in the rows on either side of the lane.

They were filmed in Luye, Taitung, on a government research farm.

It worked because of one accident of horticulture. Commercial tea is kept clipped to waist height so it can be picked. Here, a block of Assam stock — Taiwan Tea No. 8 — has been left for over thirty years, unpruned, and has grown past two metres. The rows close overhead into tunnels. That overgrown canopy is the only thing in Taiwan that reads as a Himalayan estate on camera, and the production found it.

The lane KK's truck runs down is lined with small-leaf terminalia. There is a second planted avenue of kapok along the western edge of the site. The valley floor here is grey-podzolised red earth, mildly acidic, at a hundred and seventy-five metres, with an annual average of eighty-five percent humidity and more than two thousand millimetres of rain. It feels tropical because it is.

Be clear about what this place is: a working agricultural research station of about thirty hectares, founded in 1981, not a tourist attraction. The outdoor tea roads are open ground and cycling them is how people normally see it. Formal visits require an application. Stay on the roads and out of the rows.

Walk into the old Assam block and let the canopy close over your head. Then remember that the first minute of the series was shot standing where you are, and pretending it was two thousand kilometres west.

Location data: Tea and Beverage Crops Research Station, Eastern Branch, 臺東縣鹿野鄉龍田村北二路66號. Note travel media often misprint the address as 龍七路. Photo shows tea picking in the surrounding Luye plantations, not the station itself — no free image of the station exists.