LEO Hsieh dreams of painting Asia Blue. In the space of only a few months, the Chinese-Filipino entrepreneur has cracked the highly competitive and protected Taiwanese beer market, raising Canada's premier beer, Labatt's Blue, from an underdog and into the ranks of the top-10 foreign beers sold on the island - even ahead of Carlsberg. Every month, two containers of Blue leave Labatt's Vancouver brewery and are shipped by sea to Taiwan for distribution to the island's swank pubs and discos, where Taiwanese yuppies pay US$4 or more for a bottle of imported beer. Bringing Canadian beer to Taiwan is no piece of cake, but Mr Hsieh gets excited at the thought of getting the burgeoning ranks of Asian beer drinkers hooked on Blue. He's eyeing the Philippines as his next target, and then other Asian countries. With a population of about 20 million crammed onto the island and with per capita income exceeding $10,000, he sees the Taiwan market as an obvious springboard into the broader Asian market. If past experience is any indicator, Mr Hsieh will go to great lengths to get bottles of Blue into even the most inhospitable regions of Asia. Recently, he was able to get two containers of Blue through warring Cambodian factions and into the hands of the Canadian contingent of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) and to guests at the Holiday Inn Hotel in Phnom Penh. ''I had to go to Singapore to pick up the payment for that shipment,'' Mr Hsieh, 47, said. As for Taiwan, Mr Hsieh and other distributors of foreign beer operate in a largely cool liquor environment maintained by the Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Monopoly, whose flagship Taiwan Beer commands 94 per cent of the market. The remaining six per cent is shared among 47 foreign beer companies. ''The market was closed to foreign brands for a long time,'' Mr Hsieh said. Even though the market was opened to foreign competition about six years ago, a mind-boggling mixture of red tape and unique cultural traits make selling beer in Taiwan a frustrating experience. ''It's not easy to get people here to switch to foreign brands,'' Mr Hsieh said. Because most Taiwanese speak little English, they are reluctant to order beers with foreign labels that are difficult to pronounce. Mr Hsieh and Labatt's tackled the problem by slapping locally sold Labatt's Blue with a Chinese name and label. Fong Ye - meaning maple leaf - was the name chosen. Mr Hsieh said many cash-rich Chinese associated the maple leaf with Canada because of Canadian gold coin sales in the region. ''Because of the huge numbers of Taiwanese going to Canada they are developing consciousness of Canadian beer,'' said Michael Craddock, director of the British Columbia office in Taipei. Mr Hsieh said that because he entered the market late, he had been able to avoid the mistakes of earlier entrants. ''For one thing we didn't try to push into all of the market. We looked for bars that catered to young Chinese and expatriates.'' Besides distributing Labatt's and several types of imported spirits, Mr Hsieh has investments in the Taiwan pub chain, Montana, which has a flagship pub in Taipei's infamous Combat Zone (a night-spot once frequented by American GIs) and a second in the southern port city of Kaohsiung.