Coffee Culture in Taiwan 台灣咖啡文化

Jun 21 2008

Posted by: 阿偉 in Food and Drink, History

Yesterday, I went to the National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館) here in Taipei with my uncle to see some paintings by the French painter Jean-François Millet and his contemporaries. Since you can see those paintings in the Musée d’Orsay in France, I won’t be writing about those today. Instead, I’ll be bringing you a short segment on early ‘coffee culture’ in Taiwan. Originally, I had planned to write my second installment regarding Jihad in various traditions, and we’ll return to this regularly scheduled program after this is over.

Today, Starbucks Coffee franchises are a rather common site in Taiwanese cities, and the popularity of coffee is increasing, but for much of Chinese and Taiwanese history, it was cha, tea, which held prestige has the favored drink of commoners and literati alike. This began to change with trade contacts with the West. Coffee might have arrived as early as 1624, when Dutch traders first brought it to satisfy their tastes. The coffee crop was later re-introduced by the British in 1884, coffee production reached nearly 1,000 hectares by 1940’s. Coffee is grown in the mountainous regions in the South of Taiwan, where the climate is suitable for cultivation. Some notable places for coffee production in Taiwan are the Huisun Forest Farm in Nantou County, Hepao Mountain in Kukeng township, Yunlin County, and the Tungshan township of Tainan.

In 1895, the Qing Dynasty was forced to cede the island of Taiwan in the Treaty of Maguan (馬關條約). The Japanese, in the midst of the Meiji Restoration (明治時代) which had frustrated them towards their more tradtional Chinese and Korean neighbors, had recently become acquainted with all things Western, including the consumption of coffee. It was in fact the Japanese who set up the first coffeehouses in Taiwan, called kahuē (カフエー) in the Japanese language. During this time, it was mainly Japanese living in Taiwan, or Taiwanese who had studied abroad who frequented these establishments. Eventually, coffeehouses because the place where educated Taiwanese familiar with Western knowledge met and exchanged ideas, strengthening the integration of coffeehouses into Taiwanese society.

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