Journal
Stories from the mountains — tea making, the garden through the seasons, and everyday life at Sunrise.
Same High-Mountain Oolong — How Do Lishan and Alishan Differ?
Bringing nature into everyday life begins with knowing two mountains.
Alishan is morning light, Lishan is nightfall — six hundred metres apart, two characters. Choose by mood, not seniority; or simply brew them side by side.
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Four Seasons of a Mountain, Sealed and Handed to You
The hard part of giving isn't choosing. It's not knowing whether the thought will be seen.
The difference between one tea and another is rarely on the outside of the box — it lies in where it came from, and whose hands looked after it.
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Brewing Good Tea Well Takes Only Three Numbers
Bitterness usually isn't the tea's fault — it's three numbers you haven't pinned down.
The same bag of tea: one person brews it sweet and clean, another draws out only bitterness. Hold to 1:20, brew the moment it boils, pour it out clean — the rest you can leave to the mood of the moment.
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Why Does High Mountain Tea Taste So Sweet?
No harsh bitterness, a clean sweet finish, a cool lingering note — it all comes down to what the mountain's daily temperature swing does to the leaf.
Why is high mountain tea sweet and smooth instead of bitter? The answer lives in the altitude, the mist and the cold. A plain-language guide for the curious.
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Where Is Lishan? Meet Taiwan's "Little Switzerland"
A cloud-wrapped farm country on the Central Cross-Island Highway — where good mountains grow good fruit, and good tea.
Lishan sits in Taichung's Heping District, high on the Central Cross-Island Highway at nearly 2,000 metres. Its mist, temperate fruit and cool-climate vegetables earned it the nickname "Taiwan's Little Switzerland" — and one of the island's highest tea regions.
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Where Is Alishan? Meeting Taiwan's Mountain of Mist and Forest
A grove of thousand-year cypress, a little train that climbs the mountain, and a high-mountain oolong that's remarkably easy to love.
Alishan isn't one peak but a whole range, of sunrises, seas of cloud, and a little climbing train. Get to know the misty forest, and why its tea is such a gentle place to start.
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When Tea Steps Into a Glass
Sunrise × Shanji × UNA · A Night of Shared Flavour
We handed our Lishan and Alishan oolong to Shanji and Michelin pastry chef Una — reimagined as three cocktails and three desserts. That night, tea was no longer only tea.
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A Day in the Life of a Tea Leaf
Making Sunrise High Mountain Oolong
In late April we returned to our Alishan garden to document one day of spring tea, from branch to tin — picking, withering, tossing, kill-green, rolling, and drying.
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