Theme Site─Seshuei Area, Dayan Village, Yuchih Township, Nantou County
Experience Black Tea, Pottery, and Ecology at Seshuei Area
White houses with blue tiles and pitched roofs are randomly spread on the freshly green hills. |
Every single blessing pottery board branded with the hand and foot prints of residents and drawn by them can exhibit the common will and joint collaboration of people in the Seshui community. |
White houses with blue tiles and pitched roofs are randomly spread on the freshly green hills. |
Along Jhongtan road to Yuchih Township, near Sun Moon Lake, the pottery sign stands at the entrance of Seshuei Community. As a car turns into the trail to the village, the beautiful scenery of the basin unfolds like a melodic poem. Moreover, great numbers of refined pitched roofs all around the village make the visitors experience the enthusiasm and hope of the inhabitants.
For a hundred years, this place has always remained as an unknown village standing along the SunmoonLake. Yet the convulsion of September 21 Earthquake has evoked the determination of local residents in depression and helplessness to reconstruct and transform this whole area. Under the guidance of such agencies as the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau, the Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan, the Seshui clan has been incorporated into the overall construction project of this community, where 70 residential families are mobilized to take advantage of the beautiful scenes and rich natural resources in the basin that have remained intact over one hundred years, get back the Assam Black Tea typical of their ancestral feature agriculture, and restore the old burning pottery culture. At present, Seshui has become an ideal place where tourists can drink the black tea, learn to burn pottery and enjoy the natural resources.
It is by no means specious to use the term “Xanadu” for the description of Seshui community, through which both the Seshui River and Taomi River run to impenetrate. Due to the high humidity in this area, the Seshui community has continuously been the black tea growing area over one hundred years. When you tread on the rural flagstone walkways, you can enjoy the view of diversified agricultural produces in this area, gardens on terrace, and feature flower industry.
Feature Accommodation Experience of Rural Scenery
Golden accommodation and green-color traveling experience |
Splendid scenery and flexuous paths of serenity are typical characteristics of the Seshui Community of the Yuchih Township, where the civil accommodation Lu Yuan has become renowned in the Seshui area by means of rendering the assam black tea and pottery making programs merged with leisure experience. The whole family of the owner of this premise was mobilized to construct their outdoor kiosk garden, where they adopted the discarded timbers as the raw materials and used the areca palm trunk as the axis of eaves to build up a round-shape garden with kiosks and seats. Quite exceptive here are the traditional firewood-burning stove used on the first floor for tourists to take a spa, as well as the bathtubs in the bathroom that are refitted from the big pottery jars popularly burned in the area of Seshui, while the black tea packs are prepared standby. So, consumers here can well take a hot and steamy black tea bath. Furthermore, they have employed the No. 18 black tea, a variety of topgallant quality grown in this area to make the black tea pineapple cakes and black tea nougats, whose tastes are really unforgettable.
Never miss the savory and palatable countryside cooked dishes of Seshui if you visit here. |
Never miss the Aunty A-Man’s Countryside Cooking restaurant if one wants to have a taste of feature foods in Seshui. Aunty A-Man is a Hakka woman living in PingTung, whose cooking skills are highly admired by all the gourmands. Tables and chairs inside and outside this restaurant are all designed to be made of wooden sleepers, thus displaying an unvarnished and charming style. Meanwhile, the kiosk garden of this premise is also carefully built up. Predominating over the delicacies of this restaurant would be those Hakka and countryside cooked dishes, as well as the Chinese aloes (an optimal option for beautification) dipping with the Cherry Bay sauce, whose tastes are extremely appealing. Chops of the chickens raised by this restaurant are very smooth and savory if added with the garlic paste. Also available here would be milk and short rib soup, as well as stewed countryside chicken with special plants. Every bite of such delicious soups would involve the fragrance of Pina Colada, and therefore, gourmands visiting here would more often than not drink until the pot bottom is disclosed.
Master Chan Zhen Hsiong who is regarded as a state treasure role has rekindled and revitalized the pottery arts in Seshui. |
The pottery arts & crafts burned in the firewood kilns of Seshui will not be glazed, but they can display variously changing lusters. |
With the unique taste throughout Taiwan, the HongYu tea receives great popularity
Black tea of the Yuchih Township was first grown in 1925 when Japan occupied Taiwan. At then, the Japanese people introduced the Assam Black Tea, a big-leaf variety from the Indian Assam province into Taiwan. As a result, the QuePing area of Yuchih Township,
The birth of Potter Arts Classroom has given a propitious start to the pottery industry in Seshui. |
The sparkling and transparently red No. 18 Black tea can be very fresh, smooth and sweet, thus gaining the fame of Seshui Royal Tea. |
SunmoonLake was selected as the grow place in that the local climate and soil texture were very similar to those available in the Assam Province. The black tea of Yuchih Township was once a key special product that Taiwan exported overseas, and was also a tribute paid by Japanese to their emperor who accepted it as a Royal treasure. As it was impossible to raise the price of black tea later, the tea gardens were gradually displaced by the area plantation gardens. Thanks to the great efforts made by the tea research and extension station of the council of agriculture in tea seed cultivation, and in the hybridization of Assam black tea and wild mountain tea in Taiwan, the No. 18 black tea of top-notch quality, which is also called as HongYu, has been produced eventually. Due to its excellent flavor and the appropriate marketing strategies, the HongYu can now command a highly increasing market.
Local features of this area do not only exist in the black tea, but also in the abundant resource of Baixian clay it owns distinctively, which can be used for the pottery industry. The president of the community development association has relied on his own land to open a community pottery arts classroom, and has recruited the old Master, Mr. Chan Zhen Hsiong who has an experience of 45 years to come back home to promote the hand-made pottery industry of Seshui, while the local residents have worked together to fulfill the complete exploitation of local resources and introduce relevant activities for tourist to gain a happy touring experience here.
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2006