Taiping Blue

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.