Lin Hua Tai Tea Co. (林華泰茶行)

Lin Hua Tai has traded from the same address on Chongqing North Road in Taipei's Datong District since 1883, making it one of the city's oldest continuously operating tea merchants -- by its own account, one of Taipei's oldest tea shops period -- and it has never expanded into a second branch. The range covers the core of Taiwanese oolong: Dong Ding and other high-mountain oolongs, Wenshan Pouchong, and Dongfang Meiren (Oriental Beauty, a white-tipped oolong), alongside green teas like Dragon Well and Green Snail Spring, black teas, tieguanyin and specialty blends, sold loose from large open containers rather than pre-packaged boxes, with prices posted plainly and no push to upsell. The shop's storefront stays deliberately plain, a reflection, by local accounts, of an owner's philosophy that the tea should carry the business rather than the packaging or the shopfront design; the smell of tea leaves fills the space on entry. Staff offer factory tours to interested visitors and serve both wholesale buyers and walk-in retail customers over long daily hours, 7:30am to 9pm. For a shop that has now operated for well over 140 years from one address, the format has stayed close to what a tea merchant looked like in the late Qing and early Japanese-colonial period: bulk leaf, an honest scale, and a single storefront that never chased a second location.