Farmers pick tea leaves at a garden in Yongfu. [Photo provided to China Daily]

First grower

Every Spring Festival, Hsieh, the pioneer, drinks tea and talks with tourists in his cherry tea garden.

Fifteen years ago, he planted 8,000 cherry trees in his hillside tea garden. Viewed from afar, the paths of pink cherry blossoms can be seen winding through the green terraces.

Scenery such as this has attracted a large number of tourists to the town.

"I was in my 40s when I first came to Yongfu, and I was the first one to try growing tea here. After I produced tea as good as that grown in Taiwan, a lot of farmers from the island came here, but that was 10 years after me," he said. "The tea grown here is sweet and fragrant."

The Taiwan farmers employed traditional tea garden management methods, such as using sheep to eat the weeds, along with advanced techniques, such as "watering" the trees with soybean milk to raise the level of nutrition in the soil.

Because agriculture is a long-term investment, many of the farmers now regard Yongfu as their home in the mainland. They have adopted the lifestyle and married locals, and many of the families are now in their third generation, Hsieh said.

Yang said his father came to Yongfu in 2006 after hearing about the high-quality tea produced there. He hired people from Taiwan and spent about three years terracing the land and introducing or restoring the infrastructure. However, the results didn't become apparent until about 2010.

"I was still at school then. I often came here during the holidays and watched my father build our tea garden from scratch," Yang said.

"The people of my father's generation who started the tea plantations had great persistence and perseverance. There were many uncertainties in building infrastructure in the mountains. Sometimes, my father had to drive five or six hours to buy a single component, such as a connector for a water pipe."

Yang said he knew from a young age that he would take over his father's business, so he studied tea science at a college in Fujian, where he met his wife, a Guangdong province native who was studying tea culture.

"We work well together. I am in charge of tea production, and she is better at tea culture promotion. We often travel countrywide to develop markets, and we invite many people to visit our plantation," he said.