In a greenhouse, pots of orchid seedlings nourish the strong life of Taiwan's orchids. From private plant growers to large public companies like Taiwan Sugar, separately or together, they have created a legendary success.

In a recent orchid competition in Vancouver, Canada, this year, the hall was filled with the aroma and beauty of orchids from all over the world. One Cattleya orchid from Taiwan was especially attractive. Its two huge flowers were pure yellow, with no trace of other colors. This plant won the love of 350 judges from around the world and received the crown that is handed out once every three years.

Perennial winner

This Cattleya orchid came from southern Taiwan, and in fact it has won numerous awards both in Taiwan and abroad. Whenever there is no competition, its owner, Wu Ming-kun, keeps it on display in his "orchid hotel" in Tainan, in southern Taiwan.

Taiwan Sugar Corporation, a Taiwanese public corporation, was also at the Vancouver competition with its ten-year experience in Phalaenopsis orchids. The company grabbed the trophy for the group category.

When the competition was over, the Pacific-Asia Orchid Committee unanimously decided that Taiwan would host the 2004 Pacific-Asia orchid exhibition. For some time, Taiwan has been invited to join every major orchid competition, and its orchids have consistently been prize-winners.

Taiwan has become famous for its hot electronics sector, but in the world's agricultural industry its high-technology orchid sector has come to occupy an important position.

In Amsterdam, the world's largest flower market, Taiwan's Phalaenopsis orchid is slowly gaining a foothold. In Japan, the world's largest consumer of Phalaenopsis, the Taiwanese product has taken up fifteen percent of the market share. Many Japanese growers now import seeds from Taiwan and raise them in Japan. In the United States, Taiwanese are setting up distribution centers to enter the local market. In sum, Taiwan's orchids have been produced with better technology and are far superior in quality than those from traditional areas such as China, Southeast Asia or Central and South America.

Many Taiwanese growers consider their sales a secret, but total orchid exports have jumped to the highest in the world. In the same way that Taiwan's small- and medium-sized businesses have been the mainstay of the country's economic miracle of the last few decades, individual orchid fanciers, gardens and nurseries are the endless source of the miracle of Taiwanese orchids.

An irresistible power

"Growing orchids can easily suck you in, so don't try it before you're ready for it." Skillful orchid growers always repeat this to freshmen, hoping they will not get in over their heads. However, the "fatal attraction" of the orchid cannot prevent human lovers from throwing themselves in wholeheartedly.

Fanciers normally start out with a simple potted orchid, a sprayer and some fertilizer. They move from their balconies to their rooftops, and then to greenhouses. Finally, they build whole commercial nurseries or tourist orchid parks and go into business.

Lin Shih-ching, a retired soldier in his fifties, is a typical example. Some twenty years ago, a friend gave him two pots of Cattleya orchids, but the flowers never bloomed. Frustrated, he did some research on the flower and built a small orchid hut on his roof. As he learned more about the field, he grew all sorts of orchids.

After he retired from the military, Lin started to build his dream. On a small mountain in Pinghsi, Taipei County, he rented some land from a friend. With a total of NT$2.5 million [US$62,500] from his retirement pension and loans, he cultivated the land, built a road, and erected a greenhouse, a rare thing in northern Taiwan (because of the weather, most orchid greenhouses are in central and southern Taiwan).

In this small greenhouse, there are hundreds of Phalaenopsis orchids in red, white, yellow, light green, dark purple, and so on. The light, elegant fragrance of the orchids permeates the room. When you take a breath you smell nothing, but the fragrance goes into your body and mind.

The orchids are the result of Lin's many experiments. Talking about hybridizing orchids, he expounds his "watercolor theory." He picked up a large white orchid and another with small dots, pointed to a large yellow orchid with a trace of apple-green, and described his genetic process, or art: "This large white orchid enlarged the small dotted one, and the dots were replaced by the white color gene. So the new product has a pure yellow color. The dotted orchid does not have many flowers, but the new plant does."

"There are so many original orchids," he continued. "Crossbreeding is like asking a question to which everyone gives you a different answer. The mystery lies in one’s technique, inspiration, experience and artistic perspective." Lin goes to his "laboratory" once every two or three days to find out what happens when he crosses this and that flower.

Dazzling the world

Lin has extended his business to central and southern Taiwan. With his twenty-odd years of experience in growing orchids, he now turns the results of his work over to satellite orchid nurseries that raise and sell his breeds. His company has expanded from the domestic to the international market. The Internet is one of his sales windows. His wife designed their Web site, which has attracted a lot of business with its unique style, English text and lively orchid animations. "Today's exporting business is fiercely competitive, so the most important thing is to have the best seeds," Lin said confidently. "Good quality is the only effective guarantee of sales."

With the takeoff of the Taiwanese economy in the 1970s, at least 10,000 amateurs like Lin began raising the Cattleya. Many of them imported high-quality flowers from overseas and created many new species. In the eighties and nineties, Phalaenopsis replaced Cattleya as the star of the consumer market. Experts around Taiwan used all their skill to produce fantastic new hybrids that dazzled the world. These amateur "flower addicts" were the foundation for the current superiority of Taiwan"s orchid industry.

Wu Ming-kun, manager of an agricultural development company, works with a number of amateur growers. Whenever a good orchid flower is created, Wu pays from NT$30 [US$0.90] to $50,000 [US$1515]. That Cattleya, which has won him many awards, was developed eight years ago by a grower in Tainan, southern Taiwan, who handed it over to Wu to apply for a patent. Wu has created two thousand copies. After so many awards, the price of this champion Cattleya is skyrocketing.

A great business opportunity

It all started thirty years ago when Wu was still in elementary school in Tainan. One day he found NT$700 [US$17.50] on the road and handed the money over to the police. However, no one came to claim the money, so after the required time had passed, it was returned to Wu. On his way home, he happened to pass by a street vendor selling orchids, and on impulse he bought two plants. After this simple act, he could never escape from his fascination with orchids. In high school, he even developed a method of breeding orchids without pollination.

Now Wu works with more than fifty satellite orchid companies, and he has even extended his business to mainland China. In cooperation with a tobacco company in Yunnan Province, he established the biggest orchid producer in China. The company occupies three hundred hectares [741 acres] of land and produces five million non-Chinese orchids a year. He also has the biggest orchid mericloning factory in China, which produces 1.5 million orchid seedlings a year. All the orchids from China in this year's exhibition in Vancouver came from this company.

When Wu went to Yunnan more than ten years ago, he saw business opportunities everywhere. Paphiopedilum and Cymbidium grew abundantly on hillsides within hand's reach. For hundreds of years, the locals had used them to feed the chickens. At that same time, a slipper orchid sold in Japan for NT$1,100 [US$27.5] and a Cymbidium was worth even more. Wu thought that if he could find a good hill with more than a hundred hectares [247 acres] of land and good irrigation, and if he could produce thirty million orchids a year in the year-round warm weather of Yunnan, he could make at least NT$60 billion [US$1.5 billion]

He therefore invested a lot of money in Yunnan and helped build roads, a hospital and a world-class tourist orchid garden with a huge international conference center. Unfortunately, restrictions imposed by the Chinese government and betrayal by a friend fouled his dream. The factory now only plants orchids for other companies. Thinking about that time, he is now able to laugh about it.

Wu's ultimate success after several failures is due to the availability of the best seeds and the best technology in Taiwan. Here the propagation of orchids is considered as little more than intensive technological processing, but in mainland China it is treated as a kind of esoteric biological technology. The way in which each and every orchid plant develops its nutrients is considered top secret. For instance, when Wu asks mainland Chinese factories to process his orchids, the chemicals used are marked by symbols so that people there won't know the ingredients.

With respect to mericloning [a method of taking a small piece of a plant and cutting it up to reproduce any number of copies of the original] and propagating orchids, many orchid exporting countries are still not in a position to compete against Taiwan. The seventeen-year-old orchid garden of National Taiwan University, the best in Taiwan, leads the way in running a well-organized orchid enterprise.

The garden, located next to a provincial highway in Changhua County, southern Taiwan, has become a must-see spot for tourists. In the labs, technicians skillfully plant seeds, transplant seedlings, and do mericloning. In the greenhouses, large, medium and small seedlings are arranged in order. In the gift center, all sorts of orchid flowers send out their fragrance and show off their styles and colors.

Garden manager Lai Pen-chih used to work at the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute, where he became well versed in mericloning technology. He started the Taiwan University orchid garden with four truckloads of Cattleya flowers, and now the garden covers seven hectares [17.3 acres] of land and works with more than ten satellite nurseries. Well ahead of any other professional orchid enterprise, the garden is called "the source of orchid technology" for Taiwan. When today's orchid giant, Taiwan Sugar Corporation, was setting up its own orchid business, representatives came to the garden several times to observe and learn.

However, the garden did experience a few growing pains. In 1986, Supertyphoon Wayne blew down all the greenhouses. "At that time, we had to personally rebuild all the greenhouses and save each and every orchid seedling," said Lai. "We learned a lot from that. The columns were all made thicker and we got a greenhouse company to redesign our greenhouses. You can say we really paid our tuition!"

A complete production system

The most revolutionary change in Taiwan's orchid industry was the entry of the Taiwan Sugar Corporation, the government sugar monopoly, into the market. Some orchid enterprises resent the company while others admire it. Such an enormous public company is hard to ignore.

Taiwan Sugar was very successful in choosing orchid raising as the first step in its transformation towards specialty agriculture. In comparison to other agricultural products, raising orchids requires intensive technology and intensive capital investment. At least NT$40D50 million [US$1.2D1.5 million] must be invested for each hectare [2.47 acres] of greenhouse. When Taiwan Sugar invested its huge capital in the orchid business, it also pushed Taiwan's orchid industry up to a higher level.

Taiwan Sugar's large-scale production helped to stabilize sources for Taiwan's Phalaenopsis orchid exports. Lower production costs brought cheaper, standardized flowers out of the orchid fanciers' market and into the general consumer market. The company's large-scale production established an industry-wide standard and a framework for production systems. Finally, Taiwan Sugar's success encouraged other large corporations to enter the orchid market.

Today orchid greenhouses in every part of Taiwan have gradually followed the standard which Taiwan Sugar set by importing computer-controlled greenhouses from Holland. The water wall and double-layer black net are special inventions designed for the hot climate in southern Taiwan.

Early summer in southern Taiwan is extremely hot, but inside a greenhouse it is quite pleasant. Cool, humid air comes out from the water wall and a large fan expels hot air outside the greenhouse. Thus, orchid seedlings are well protected and grow steadily in controlled temperature and humidity.

Hsu Tsung-yao, deputy director of the Taiwan Sugar specialty agriculture center, is quite proud of the company's orchid production system. "It's not hard to grow an orchid, but it's not easy to stabilize its quality. Phalaenopsis is quite sensitive to its environment, so you have to watch out for the air, temperature, humidity, light, nutrition and salinity for the whole year. If you make three mistakes, your entire production might be ruined."

The center is located in the countryside in Tainan. It is quite out of the way, but the center is the most important place in Taiwan Sugar's orchid production. Visitors are awed by their first sight of the huge production line. Although the place is so enormous, there are no more than ten administrators, including Hsu. For more than ten years, he and his colleagues have worked hard and gradually built up this plant. Waves of visitors never stop coming, and Hsu is able to answer all of their questions expertly.

A group of businesspeople from Holland concluded that Taiwan Sugar was so successful because the staff knew every detail of the nursery. "We know what we are doing, and we are clear about every step," Hsu said confidently. "So if there is any mistake, we can correct it right away."