Poetry, Tea, and Landscape in Taiwan at the Turn of the 20th Century

• In Event: 165. Global Tea Initiatives: Horticultural Practice and Gastronomical Perspectives in Tea History. Sponsored by UC Davis Global Tea Initiative

Abstract

The advent of gold- and coal mining in late 19th- and early 20th-century Taiwan aroused palpable unease among literati over their visibly deleterious effects on agriculture and forest management. One of the vehicles by which these writers expressed such sentiments was zhuzhici poetry, a genre of seven-character quatrains devoted to topics of local landscapes and customs. This paper explores the intersection of local tea cultivation and environmental angst in such poetry, especially in the subgenre known as caicha (“tea-picking”) zhuzhici. These poems often feature a stock character, the indigenous tea-picking maiden, whose beauty and lithe movements are set against the verdant camellia sinensis-covered hillsides where she goes about her daily routine. The mining operations that enter into this terrain violate not only its horticultural serenity, but implicitly and sometimes explicitly the tea maiden, too, who is left bereft of her natural habitat and at the mercy of inscrutable forces, both foreign and domestic. For comparative purposes, the paper will also present some examples of late-Choson era Korean zhuzhici (Korean jukjisa) that express anxiety over the disruption to local geomantic conditions by Anglo-American gold mining operations. I conclude with a discussion of how Japanese waka poems about tea cultivation, written by Mitsui conglomerate employees in northern and central Taiwan, apparently reflect at least some familiarity with local tea-themed zhuzhici, and share with them the implicit imperative to shield the landscape, and thus protect company interests, from the encroachment of the extractive industries then spreading across the rugged interior of the island.

Author

• Stephen J. Roddy, University of San Francisco