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Magazine digest -- Century-old tea shop taking small modern step
2010/07/23 21:42:49 |
Walking into the Chun Fat tea shop in southern Taiwan's Tainan City is like traveling back 50 years in time. With its 88-year-old owner Yen Tsan-cheng sitting at the counter with a shelf of old tin tea jars behind him, buying tea is more a ritual than a simple transaction.
When you buy tea there, Yen selects one of the jars that have been used for over 150 years and pours leaves slowly onto two white sheets of paper layered together. He then wraps it into a box-shaped package and provides the final touch by stamping the company's seal on the wrapper.
The process may not be much different than when the shop opened in 1860, but it is now cautiously stepping into the modern world thanks to the efforts of the owner's twenty-something granddaughter.
"I came back to be with my grandpa and grandma, " Yen Ling-chen said about why she returned from Taipei last year.
At first, she had difficulty adjusting to the change in lifestyle, but after becoming acquainted with veterans of the tea business and cultural workers in the city, her appreciation of the shop changed.
She has now learned the business and developed new ideas on how to run it, but she has had a hard time persuading her grandfather to go along. "The shop is not his main income source, so he just wants to keep it the way it is," she said.
Her first success was taking part last year in a local coming of age celebration, where children aged 16 give thanks to the goddesses watching over them on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, the goddesses' birthday.
The shop produced and sold out all 400 special designed packages of tea it prepared for the occasion as gifts of thanksgiving.
As this year's celebration approaches, Yen Ling-chen said the shop will participate again and introduce a new packaging design, even if her family doubts the initiative will turn a profit.
She said she insists on taking part in such events to reach out to the public so more people can understand the traditional tea culture.
"I feel an old shop should have the guts to do so," she said.
As she becomes more involved in the tea business, she said she hopes the shop can produce its own tea rather than buying tea made according to the shop's prescribed method, but she will not change much about the shop so it maintains its authenticity.
"My grandpa spends every day of his life here, and everything in the shop has his touch. I don't want it to be a strange place to him," she said. (Business Weekly 1182)(translated by Kay Liu) enditem/ls
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