## [Coming Home to the Tea Industry: Sharing My Journey](/returnhome_2teaindustry) *Submitted by yiguo2000 on Fri, 10 Jul 2026 - 13:14* ## Starting with What I Learned at Home After returning home to enter the tea industry, the first question I faced was: where do I even begin? Actually, having grown up helping my parents make tea and manage the tea garden, I already had a foundation in the basic operations and knowledge of the trade. So once I came home, it was only natural that I started learning tea-making from my father. Once I had progressed to a certain stage and gained a better understanding of the classic tea varieties out in the market, I came to feel that my father’s skill at roasting tea was truly impressive — his black tea and oolong were both excellent — so I stayed by his side and learned from him. Around that time, I also visited a friend of my father’s to observe pan-firing tea, and that’s when I learned that “pan-firing” (chao cha), as practiced to suit the preferences of Taiwan’s tea competitions, is usually done at high heat and quickly, so the moisture in the leaves and stems dries out faster, giving the finished oolong a cleaner finish. Later I also encountered other firing methods, including a style closer to mainland Chinese practice known as “re-firing” (huihuo chao). This taught me something: when you learn a craft, what you’re really learning is a basic framework. Which direction to take it from there, and what flavor profile to aim for, depends on having your own vision — knowing clearly what kind of product you actually want to make. ## From Experience to Theory: Why I Turned to Research Papers Along the way, I ran into many moments where I couldn’t find an answer to “why.” My father and the old master craftsmen in the countryside mostly make tea by feel and experience — they can produce it, but they have a hard time explaining the principles behind it. Later I also took courses at the Tea Research and Extension Station. The courses there are divided by subject — tea tree pruning, basic semi-fermentation, Ruby (Hong Yu) black tea production, and so on — but because instructors have to teach students at very different levels, they can’t go too deep into theoretical or scientific content; they can only cover the overall pace of the curriculum. Many of the finer details you have to ask about privately afterward, and even then, the teacher won’t necessarily explain everything. I don’t think this is because the teachers are deliberately holding back — I think it’s more that they worry different students have different levels of understanding, and going too deep might send someone down a rabbit hole. What you learn there is the overall framework of the industry, but within that framework there are still countless “whys” left over, and the rest you have to work out on your own, organizing your own notes and slowly piecing together the answers. I myself studied physics, and later worked in the materials industry — I even went to the UK to study ceramic materials. In materials research, you constantly run into “whys,” and in that world we’re used to looking things up in academic papers — especially papers written in English. The logic of academic writing lays everything out clearly: what previous researchers have done, what this particular study set out to do, what didn’t work, what difficulties came up, how they were overcome, how the research goals and feasibility were framed, and finally the results and possible future applications. Once I brought that habit into the tea industry, I found that research literature like *Tea Aroma Formation* taught me a great deal that spoke directly to the questions in my mind — things like the molecular chemistry of tea, the mechanisms of fermentation and oxidation, and the variability of raw materials. Searching in English usually gets you close to an answer; but if you only search in Chinese, a lot of the technical questions within the industry are hard to find explanations for. By comparison, the gap in depth between Chinese- and English-language resources, when it comes to the question of “why,” is quite striking. ## How to Find a Good Tea Teacher When I first entered the tea industry, people often felt that tea was such a complex subject that not everyone could pick it up, so the instinct was to find a tea master and formally apprentice yourself to them. But once you commit to following one particular teacher from the start, you often end up confined within that person’s own system. So my advice would be: read widely and explore broadly on your own first, and only then go find a teacher you genuinely like and click with — an open-minded teacher tends to offer far more inspiration. Tea isn’t really just a technique — it’s a medium for connecting with people and weaving into everyday life, whether that’s serving tea to guests at home or encountering tea-house culture abroad; tea is a bridge between art and commerce. Because of that, if a teacher is overly authoritarian, or if certain claims are stated too dogmatically, that teacher may not be right for you. I believe a truly good teacher is someone whose thinking and philosophy have matured — someone who shows you a wider world, rather than confining you within their own personal framework, and who would never use criticism to stifle the development of your own character. Learning tea is, in a way, also about cultivating a certain aesthetic and taste for living — not simply memorizing one “correct” set of answers. ## There Is No Single Right Way In the tea world, you often hear people declare, with total certainty, “this is how it should be done.” But I’ve noticed that people who are genuinely engaged in real scholarship rarely talk that way. It’s like professors teaching materials science at university — they never say “you must do it this way.” Instead they’ll say, “if you want to achieve a certain effect, you could try this,” or they’ll lay out five different possible approaches, A through E, because there’s never just one path to the same destination. Whichever path you choose, you’ll have your own reasons for it — maybe it’s simply the equipment you happen to have on hand, or maybe you want to explore the effect of some particular variable through a specific method. In a way, this is also an expression of style: the results might converge, but the process and the way you present it will differ. This reminds me of my daughter, who recently started learning trigonometry at school. One time we sat down together to work out how to prove the Pythagorean theorem. I walked her through the most intuitive, visual way to understand it, and afterward, when I looked it up in a book, I discovered that as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were already more than three hundred different proofs of the Pythagorean theorem — it was never a matter of just one “correct” derivation. ## The Many Paths of Fermentation Science The tea industry is really also part of food science, especially when it comes to fermentation. How large molecules get broken down through fermentation into smaller ones, generating rich flavor while also preserving the tea and allowing for further flavor development later on — the methods for doing this are highly diverse, and shouldn’t be constrained by what any single “master” says, because the world keeps changing and knowledge keeps evolving. In this industry, people often use criticism as a way to showcase their own expertise. But looking back, the people I genuinely respect from the bottom of my heart aren’t necessarily the ones carrying the title of “teacher” — they’re the ones who actually helped open my eyes to a wider view. From my own experience, I’ve gradually noticed a pattern: the truly formidable elders in this field tend to come across as gentle and humble, saying little — but the moment the conversation turns to real practice and research, the depth of their knowledge is immediately obvious. It’s often the opposite with people who rose quickly and were crowned “teacher” early on — they tend to carry more of an air of authority and care more about saving face. It reminds me of the atmosphere in America’s specialty coffee and specialty tea scenes in recent years — there’s a real aversion there to “guru culture,” and instead a much greater emphasis on each person’s own experience in the moment of tasting, and on the story behind the tea (or coffee), rather than on whoever happens to hold the title or make the loudest claim. Tea, historically, was mostly learned through a master–apprentice system, and Jin Yong’s wuxia novels offer a good parallel here. In *The Smiling, Proud Wanderer*, the characters Yue Buqun and Feng Qingyang embody exactly these two types. Yue Buqun sees nothing beyond his own Qi Sect of Mount Hua, insisting that his is the one true orthodox school of martial arts. Feng Qingyang, by contrast — an elder of the rival Sword Sect who has no interest in factional infighting — encourages younger students to draw freely on the strengths of every school, to absorb techniques from opponents in real combat, and to forge their own moves out of their own understanding and insight: what’s known as “using no fixed form to defeat fixed forms.” Tea-making follows the same logic — the people who go the farthest are rarely the ones who cling rigidly to some notion of “orthodoxy” and strike a pose to maintain it. They’re the ones willing to keep an open mind, absorb what’s best from others, and ultimately develop a style entirely their own. This isn’t something you only see in the tea industry. Back when I worked at Japanese and American companies, I noticed that the people who were truly skilled always had their own line of inquiry — steadily building up their own path and their own methods, rather than simply repeating what others had already said. Whether it’s materials research or making tea, the people who go the farthest in the end are always the ones willing to work out the “why” for themselves and keep building their own approach over time. ### tags - [心得](/zh-hant/taxonomy/term/389) [Log in](/user/login?destination=/returnhome_2teaindustry%23comment-form) or [register](/user/register?destination=/returnhome_2teaindustry%23comment-form) to post comments [](https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Fformosa-tea.com%2Freturnhome_2teaindustry&title=Coming%20Home%20to%20the%20Tea%20Industry%3A%20Sharing%20My%20Journey)