ABSTRACT
Just to look at Mr. Zhang’s tea fields is to see that they are different. Arriving at his small farm after a bumpy half-hour ride in a flat-bed truck through the hills above the town of Beipu, you notice first the long grass growing between the rows of tea plants; if left unchecked, it seems the grass will soon cover them entirely. Looking closer, you see that a host of animal species has taken up residence among the tea. Zhang points them out as he walks among the bushes: a spider’s web traced across the face of one plant, a dense cluster of caterpillars hidden beneath the foliage of another. It is a far cry from the neatly manicured rows of tea bushes commonly seen in Taiwanese tourism campaigns. Yet what at first appear to be signs of neglect-tea plants converged upon by weeds, a crop riddled with pests-are in fact manifestations of a particular approach to agriculture that in Taiwan is known as “natural farming” (自然農法 ziran nongfa), or what Zhang calls the “ecological school” (生態派 shengtai pai) of tea cultivation.1 For farmers of this stripe, the plant and animal life that surround their tea plants are not pests to be eradicated but constituents in a complicated and contingent play of agencies, a tea-field “ecosystem”, whose dynamism is thought to determine the quality of each tea crop.
