Alishan
Organic
Center

The Alishan tea region of Chiayi County, and the standards that govern organic production.

Everything here is decided by how high up it is

Chiayi City sits at about 30 metres. Alishan station is at 2,216. The gardens, the cloud, the railway and the forest each occupy a band of that climb.

05001,0001,5002,000 m
Chiayi30 mFenqihu1,400 mAlishan2,216 mGardens1,000–1,600 m
30 m

Chiayi City, on the plain. The forest railway starts here.

1,400 m

Fenqihu, roughly halfway up the 1912 line.

1,000–1,600 m

The band the gardens occupy, and the band the cloud reaches.

2,216 m

Alishan station, and the branch to the Zhushan platform.

Layered mountain ridges rise above a cloud inversion beneath a colorful sunset sky
The inversion sitting below the ridge line. It forms on most days through the growing season and burns off from beneath.Photo: Alishan National Forest Recreation Area Sea of Clouds (Huaiwun) · Wikimedia Commons
The Mountain

Cloud that arrives on a schedule

The daily cloud belt cuts direct sun and holds the temperature swing that high-mountain tea depends on, which is a growing condition rather than scenery.

Read this first
36Months

Three years before the land qualifies

Why the land waits

The USDA National Organic Program requires that no prohibited substance has been applied to the land for 36 months before harvest. The EU regulation reaches the same figure for a perennial crop such as tea. The bush is unchanged on the last day of that period and the day after; what changes is that the record is long enough to audit.

Also worth your time
The Mountain

Three different rulebooks, one word

The EU organic regulation, the USDA National Organic Program and Taiwan's Organic Agriculture Promotion Act of 2018 are separate legal instruments with separate requirements, and equivalence between them is negotiated.

Read
The Trials

What the studies actually say

Meta-analyses report differences in some secondary metabolites and in pesticide residues, and much smaller differences in the macronutrients people assume.

Read
Where this is

Chiayi County, on the western slope

Four points on the climb: the city on the plain, the halfway town, the station at the top of the line, and the scenic area around it. Thirty-six kilometres end to end, and 2,186 metres of it vertical.

  1. 1Chiayi30 m
  2. 2Fenqihu1,400 m
  3. 3Alishan2,216 m
  4. 4Alishan Scenic Area1,000–2,600 m
  • Order of the three stations on the climb (schematic, not the alignment)
  • Land · Sea
  • Area of the detail, on the locator
The growing area sits east of Chiayi City, between roughly 1,000 and 1,600 metres.Geometry: Natural Earth
A narrow-gauge track curving into cedar forest, mist

The line went up in 1912, and it went up for timber.

The turntable at the forest railway garage park in Chiayi. The line was laid to 762 mm gauge to get round the gradient.Photo: Turntable at Alishan Forest Railway Garage Park · Wikimedia Commons
Five sections, nineteen pieces

Gardens we grow beside.

Organisations supporting the writing on this site.

And with support from