Did You Know? Taiwan’s Rush Grass Hats Are Named After the Wrong Town

In 1936, the third-largest thing Taiwan sold to the world was not tea, or bananas, or camphor. It was hats. More than 16 million of them in a single year, behind only sugar and rice — and every one was woven by hand, by women, out of a grass with a triangular stem.

Here is the part that still bothers people in Miaoli: Taiwan rush grass hats are named after a town that never made them.

It starts in a riverbed in 1727

The material is 藺草 (lìn cǎo), triangle rush — a sedge that grows in the wetlands along the lower Da’an River, on the coast between present-day Taichung and Miaoli. The plant behind Taiwan rush grass hats grows to roughly 120–180 cm and can be cut up to three times a year, and the stem is the whole trick: hollow, three-sided, and splittable lengthways into fine strands that wick moisture, breathe, deodorise, and stay cool against skin. Weavers say the second harvest is the best one, and that after culling broken, insect-bitten and dead-tipped stems, only about 60% of a crop is good enough to weave at all.

By local reckoning, Pingpu Indigenous women — Taokas — were weaving that wild rush into sleeping mats by 1727. Han settlers in the neighbouring towns of 苑裡 (Yuanli) and 大甲 (Dajia) learned it from them, and by the 1760s the weave had been refined to the point where stems were being split into thirds for a finer, smoother mat. For nearly two centuries, though, it stayed exactly that: mats.

Then one woman in Yuanli made a hat

洪鴦 (Hong Yang, 1853–1941) was a Yuanli weaver who, in the mid-1890s, did the obvious thing nobody had done: she wove the rush into a brimmed hat instead of a flat mat. Why, exactly, depends on who is telling it — one account says she copied the shape of a Japanese official’s Western hat, another that she was shading a sore on her young son’s head. In 1897 the local Japanese administrator spotted what the hat could be worth commercially and asked her to organise and train the women of the town. She did, and kept going: by 1913 she was teaching handicraft at Taipei’s Third Girls’ High School, and the technique spread down the coast.

The wrong name on the label

Yuanli wove them. Dajia shipped them. Dajia was the market town and the transport hub where the finished goods were collected and sold on, so that is the name that travelled with the crates — 大甲帽蓆, “Dajia hats and mats.” The name stuck so hard that the town that actually invented the thing lost the credit for it, which is why you will still hear Yuanli people make the correction unprompted. At the 1936 peak, Yuanli’s output alone topped 16 million hats a year.

Then plastic arrived. Cheap synthetic hats gutted the trade from the 1950s onward, and by the 1970s a craft that had employed tens of thousands of women was close to gone — the same arc that flattened Taiwan rush grass hats twice over and took out Taiwan’s camphor monopoly a generation earlier.

Brought back on purpose

It survived because people decided it should. The Yuanli Rush Handicraft Museum (藺草文化館) opened in 2005 in a converted 1969 farmers’ association granary, with rush growing in the beds outside and weavers working in the hall. In 2009 local residents founded the Taiwan Rush Grass Association to pair veteran weavers with designers and put the craft back into production rather than behind glass. A single hat still takes an experienced maker at least three to five days, through sorting, splitting, rubbing, weaving, edging and blocking — which tells you most of what you need to know about why plastic won.

The takeaway: the next time you see a Taiwanese straw hat described as a “Dajia hat,” you know the real address. Taiwan rush grass hats came out of Yuanli, out of a riverbed weed, and out of one woman’s decision to change the shape of something everyone else was making flat. They belong on the short list of things the island quietly made better, alongside the indigo tunics and hand-knotted buttons that shared the same wardrobe.

We build our designs out of exactly this kind of island detail — the crafts, the countryside, the corrections. Have a look at our Taiwan-themed tees, prints and accessories, or the hats, which we will admit are not hand-woven.