Shop by craft
Best of Taichung; search or filter for all 8
Taichung / Taiwan
Mei-Dong has been brewing soy sauce by hand in Taichung's Dongshi township since 1928, rebuilding its wood-fired twin hearths after the 1999 earthquake destroyed the original vats. The family-run workshop, now in its third generation, still sources black soybeans from contracted Taiwanese farmers and welcomes visitors at its Dongqi Road address six days a week.
Best for Traditional soy sauce brewery
Taichung / Taiwan
Chun Shui Tang opened on Taichung's Siwei Street on May 20, 1983, under the name Yangxian Tea Shop, founded by Liu Han-Chieh.
Best for Bubble milk tea at the tea house credited with its invention
Chun Shui Tang opened on Taichung's Siwei Street on May 20, 1983, under the name Yangxian Tea Shop, founded by Liu Han-Chieh. Hot tea sold poorly in summer, so Liu began experimenting with cold tea drinks shaken in a cocktail shaker, an idea he traced back to a trip to Japan where he had seen coffee served cold — an unusual pairing of technique and inspiration for a traditional tea shop at the time.
In 1986, during further testing, the shop added tapioca pearls to sweetened milk tea; the drink launched formally in 1987 under the name that stuck: Bubble Tea. Traditional tea sellers initially dismissed Chun Shui Tang as a betrayer of tea culture for the innovation, an accusation that reads very differently now that bubble tea has become one of Taiwan's most recognized cultural exports.
Chun Shui Tang still operates as a full tea house rather than a to-go bubble tea chain, serving loose-leaf tea alongside the drink it is credited with inventing. Being the widely credited birthplace of a beverage now sold on nearly every continent is a rare claim for any single shop to hold, let alone one still doing business under close to its original name.
Taichung / Taiwan
The Crealive shop in Taichung carries its own Filter017 label beside emerging design brands.
Best for Street fashion, art and design brands
Huagang, Lishan, Taichung, Taiwan
HGT Hwa Gung Tea traces its roots to 1918 and is now run by a fifth generation, processing its own oolong at the Huagang factory, 2,500 meters up in the Lishan high-mountain region. It is the Michelin Guide's first global high-mountain tea partner.
Best for High-mountain Lishan oolong from a fifth-generation family
HGT Hwa Gung Tea Company traces its tea-growing roots to 1918 and is now run by a fifth generation of the same family, working from the Huagang processing factory at roughly 2,500 meters in the Lishan high-mountain tea region - one of the highest-altitude oolong-growing areas in Taiwan, where the elevation and temperature swing are what give the leaf its character. The company processes its own harvests on site rather than buying leaf from brokers, pairing generations of hands-on experience with a more scientific approach to orchard management and a traceability system that tracks tea from cultivation through production, grading and quality assurance. That combination helped it become the Michelin Guide's first global high-mountain tea partner, a recognition built around the company's stated goal of becoming a leading producer of oolong specifically, rather than a general tea house. The house philosophy, translated roughly as human-centered and tea-rooted, points to a business that still treats the processing factory and the family running it as the core of the operation, with the Michelin partnership functioning as outside validation of a method the family had already been refining for five generations rather than a marketing pivot. For high-mountain oolong drinkers, the elevation number alone - 2,500 meters - puts the leaf in company with some of the most prized growing sites in Taiwan.
Taichung / Taiwan
ORINGO's Taichung Greenway store pairs a first-floor "Shoe Research Room," stocked with the brand's handmade leather men's and women's shoes, with a second-floor reading lounge of design and menswear books. Walk-in customers can browse and try on shoes at the Xiangshang Road location, which keeps posted hours and a phone line for fitting appointments.
Best for Handmade leather shoe atelier
Taichung / Taiwan
Tae Yeon Don has baked its malt-syrup-filled sun cakes on Ziyou Road in Taichung since 1989, when founder Lin Yi-feng opened it as the street's second sun cake shop, 40 years after the original 1949 location. It's now the oldest continuously operating shop among the many that later adopted the "Sun Cake Old Shop" name.
Best for Malt-syrup sun cakes from the street's oldest surviving shop
Tae Yeon Don opened on Taichung's Ziyou Road in 1989, founded by Lin Yi-feng, who set out to maintain the cake-making traditions of the original Sun Cake shop that had opened on the same street 40 years earlier, in 1949. Decades on, Tae Yeon Don is now the oldest continuously operating shop of the many that eventually took the "Sun Cake Old Shop" name in Taichung.
The bakery makes its sun cakes — originally known as malt cakes — from premium flour, malt sugar, milk powder, honey and seasonings, aiming for what its proprietress describes as the mark of a quality sun cake: thin, crispy skin, balanced filling, and lower sugar and oil content than more heavily sweetened versions.
The shop still operates from its original Ziyou Road storefront, selling sun cakes alongside seasonal mooncakes, and takes orders in person or by phone.
Taiping, Taichung / Taiwan
Taiping Blue is an indigo-dyeing workshop and craft brand in the Toubiankeng Hakka community of Taichung's Taiping District, run by the Watersource Cultural and Educational Foundation.
Best for Hand-grown, lime-processed indigo dyeing in twelve gradient shades
Taiping Blue is an indigo-dyeing workshop and craft brand in the Toubiankeng Hakka community of Taichung's Taiping District, run by the Watersource Cultural and Educational Foundation. The foundation's chairman, Yeh Chin-yu, had worked on post-earthquake community reconstruction following Taiwan's 1999 earthquake and used that effort to revive a Hakka indigo-dyeing tradition that had largely disappeared with the spread of chemical dye; the Taiping Blue brand itself was formally established in 2011 after the foundation brought on designers Chiang Chieh-yu and Chan Ya-wen, craft specialist Tang Wen-chun, and Asia University professor Lin Ching-mei.
The workshop grows its own indigo and processes the harvested leaves with lime into a dye paste — a labor-intensive conversion the workshop describes as yielding just one kilogram of dye material from ten kilograms of leaf. Finished pieces go through sixteen separate dippings to build stable, saturated color, and the workshop maintains a twelve-shade gradient scale across that dipping process rather than dyeing toward a single fixed blue.
Taiping Blue's products — placemats, tablecloths, pillows, lamps and other home goods — have reached recognition beyond the Toubiankeng workshop itself: an Indigo Deco clock using its twelve-shade gradient won the 2018 Golden Pin Design Award, and its work was shown at Maison & Objet in Paris in 2017. The workshop does not appear to operate an independent website; this profile draws on Taiwan's Hakka Affairs Council description of the workshop, corroborated by its own Facebook and Pinkoi storefronts.
Central District, Taichung
A ceramics studio established in 2020, teaching hand-pinching, wheel-throwing, slab-building, surface decoration and glazing in single workshops and ongoing courses, alongside independent studio practice.
Best for Pottery workshops and ceramics classes
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