Cafés in Taiwan Taipei, Kaohsiung and Tainan

From Hengchun to Mount Hebao

The first documented coffee farming on the island was a venture by the British trading house Tait & Co in 1884, and it did not last.³ In 1902 the Japanese colonial government planted coffee at what is now the Hengchun Tropical Botanical Garden, at the southern tip of the island, which showed that arabica suited Taiwan; seedlings were later raised on Mount Hebao (荷苞山) in Gukeng, Yunlin, and then on Mount Hua.⁴

After World War II most of the fields ran wild, and in the 1950s the government imported rust-resistant varieties from Hawaii.⁴ The modern revival began in Huashan (華山), Gukeng, after the 1999 Jiji earthquake and the mudslides that followed, when residents chose coffee as their main industry.⁵ The first Taiwan Coffee Festival, held in Gukeng in 2003, brought in NT$400 million in its first year, and the second, in 2005, NT$1.5 billion in a month.⁵

Cafés under Japanese rule

The earliest café on record in Taiwan, Cafe Lion, opened in 1911 beside Taipei New Park, now the 228 Peace Memorial Park.³ By the 1930s more than 400 Western-style establishments were on record across the island, a category that took in coffeehouses, bars and full-service restaurants, and present-day Hengyang Road near Ximending was a hub for Japanese-owned cafés.³ Coffee was a mark of modernity, often brewed in a siphon (虹吸, hóngxī), a glass vacuum brewer.⁶

Café servers of the period were all women, on fixed salaries rather than tips, and in 1933 a Keelung newspaper ran a contest for the city's most popular café waitress that drew 107 women from 24 cafés.³ Bolero (波麗路), opened in 1934, survives as a steakhouse.³

Chains and champions

Mass-market coffee arrived in stages. King Car Group founded Mr. Brown Coffee (伯朗咖啡) in 1982, Starbucks came in 1998 through a joint venture with Uni-President Enterprises, 85°C Bakery Cafe started in 2004 and Louisa Coffee and Cama Café in 2006.⁶

Taiwan's baristas have world titles of their own. Berg Wu of Taipei became the first person from Taiwan to win the World Barista Championship, in Dublin on 25 June 2016, and Taiwanese competitors have since won titles at the World Brewers Cup and the World Latte Art Championship.⁷⁶

Chiayi, Alishan and the Cup of Excellence

Taiwan ran a pilot Cup of Excellence in 2023, labeled Best of Taiwan, and full competitions followed in 2024 and 2025.⁸⁹¹⁰ In 2024 the top lot was a washed Gesha from Mingyang (名陽園) in Chiayi County, grown by Wang Cheng-yuan, which scored 92.25 and sold for US$311.50 a pound; Chiayi supplied 15 of the 20 lots in the results.⁹

In 2025 the winner was a honey-processed Gesha from Chuang Chia-jung's Chi Tsai Liu Li Mountain Fresh Café, also in Chiayi, at 91.08 points and US$180.40 a pound, and 21 of the 28 winning lots came from Chiayi, the county that includes Alishan.¹⁰ Not every winner is a Gesha: Sunlit Taiwan Coffee Farm in Nantou placed second in 2024 and fourth in 2025 with an SL34.⁹¹⁰

Taipei, Tainan and Kaohsiung

Taipei has the densest café map in Taiwan: 3.4 coffee shops per square kilometer in 2022, by Ministry of Finance figures, ahead of Tainan at 2 and Taichung at 1.7.¹ Its range runs from the 1949 Astoria on Wuchang Street and the old shophouses of Dadaocheng to pour-over bars off Yongkang Street, roasters in the East District and cafés that stay open past midnight.

Tainan, second on that measure, put its cafés into old houses. The renovation wave goes back to 2008, when the heritage foundation 古都保存再生文教基金會 held the first Lǎowū Xīnlì (老屋欣力, "old houses, new life") awards for well-reused buildings; two years later, at the second round, the city had more than 20 new public-space conversions.¹¹ Coffee also grows inside the city's boundaries, in the Dongshan hills, where cafés line Route 175. The city has run a specialty-coffee competition since 2013, followed each year by a Dongshan Coffee Festival around October.¹²

The southern port of Kaohsiung pairs harbor cafés with farms inside its own boundaries. Its best-known roaster, Jacky Lai of OH! Cafe in Gushan, took the World Coffee Roasting title in 2014 and put his COACHEF beans on commercial sale in February 2015.¹³ When Typhoon Morakot hit the city in 2009, coffee trees lost in the hills of Maolin, Namasia, Taoyuan, Liugui, Jiaxian, Neimen and Dashu were found again one by one; the farms tending them are mostly small, weeded by hand and sprayed with no chemical fertilizer or pesticide.¹⁴