this winter to the more conciliatory Kuomintang. “Everything here is political to some extent,” Yeh said. “When the government changes, the whole country changes. We’re highly influenced by who’s in charge.”

On my last day in the city, I visited Chow Yu, a trim, quiet 60-something man who runs Wistaria Tea House near Da’an Forest Park. The Taiwan-born director Ang Lee shot part of “Eat Drink Man Woman” here. It’s a creaky, Japanese-style building nearly a century old, with a garden that blends elements of traditional Japan (bamboo, koi pond) and Taiwan (soft ferns). The busy six-lane street just beyond the garden wall used to be a river, Chow said. As a boy, he’d cross it every day to go to school, on a narrow wooden bridge. The air would be full of dragonflies.

Wistaria Tea House was under renovation, so we sat at Chow’s smaller Vine House on a quiet, crooked alley nearby. It’s pretty and homey, with dark slate floors, mismatched tables and austere paintings and drawings by Chow’s artist friends. We took a seat near a window, and Chow set his sliver-thin Japanese cellphone between us. I wondered if it was made in Taiwan.

His father, he said, had been a government official, then a professor who translated Friedrich Hayek, the free-market economist and philosopher, into Chinese. (Hayek’s books were banned on the mainland.) During his dad’s university days, the house became an important salon. When Chow inherited the place, he turned it into a teahouse — not out of any love for tea, but because he kept hosting plays and concerts and readings and realized he ought to sell something. “All night, the door was open,” Chow recalled. “We’d drink and talk. It was very romantic, very bohemian.”

Lately, the tea has started to take on greater meaning for him. Old tea, especially. He’s been collecting it and serving it on special occasions. Some of his teas are almost 100 years old. He went to the basement and came back with a small canister of pu-erh tea, grown in Taiwan and picked in the early 1950s. He got a tiny clay teapot smaller than a tennis ball and a pair of shallow black cups. “We drink old tea to recall our old times,” he said, adding hot water to a pinch of long, dark leaves, “and to connect with history and memory. There is a certain bitterness that recalls time past. You can renew yourself, and look at history with a clearer mind.”

Old tea is hard to store. It takes on moisture, soaks up flavors of other teas stored nearby. “The first few brews show the imperfections most prominently,” Chow said as I took a sip. It smelled earthy and tasted woody, a little bitter. A sip almost drained the cup. “Toward the end, only the essence remains,” he said, refilling my cup again, and again. Each time, it tasted grassier, softer.

“You can taste the time,” he said. “It’s the same for people. If they can overcome the darker parts of their history, they can move on to a better place.”