For our tea supplier and tea master, Robin Chiang, tea is a lifelong calling. Raised on the daily ritual of drinking tea with his grandfather, he spent his university years wandering Taiwan’s misty high-altitude forests, studying the delicate balance between the leaf, the climate, and the terroir. 

I've always been impressed by how Taiwanese tea masters rely on their most powerful tool—their sense of smell—to curate the exact aroma they desire. Robin's tea is a perfect example of this; it has a distinctly layered fragrance and a lingering aftertaste unlike anything I've ever experienced.

I met Robin for the first time in early 2026, after weeks of emails and messages. It was a beautiful 200-year-old tea house in Tainan's historic Snail Alley. The architecture itself is a masterpiece—a rare, physical blend of Japanese colonial austerity and early Taiwanese modernism. He jokingly calls himself a "wandering tea artisan," having spent the past few years traveling across Taiwan and global tea regions to master the arts of processing and roasting.

That day, we tasted over a dozen of his handcrafted teas—prepared with the meticulous reverence unique to Taiwanese tea culture. To us, a truly exceptional tea—from cultivation and harvesting to the final crafting—is a pursuit of three sensory pillars: crispness to the eye, fragrance to the nose, and layered complexity on the palate. Every tea, or even every single batch, is unique; it captures a fleeting, singular moment in the symbiotic relationship between the mountains, the climate, and the terroir.

Robin is both a Nationally Certified Tea Maker and a government-certified sensory evaluator by Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture. He personally sources raw leaves across Taiwan and handcrafts a big portion of Hui Living's collection, ensuring an uncompromising standard of quality. A passionate educator, Robin has led 50+ workshops and traveled throughout the Himalayas and the tea estates of Darjeeling to source exceptional teas while sharing and promoting Taiwan’s rich tea heritage.

At Hui Living, his competition-level palate ensure every sip of tea you had is a perfect marriage of mountain origin and uncompromising craftsmanship.