Where does Bubble tea come from?
Bubble tea comes from Taiwan. Tea rooms there began dropping chewy tapioca balls into sweet tea in the 1980s, and the drink, also called pearl milk tea or boba, has since spread from Taiwan to cities all over the world.
Two tea rooms, two claims
In Tainan, Tu Tsong-he of the Hanlin Tea Room said he spotted fenyuan, white tapioca balls he had loved as a child, at the Yamuliao market in 1986. He dropped them into green tea, where they looked like his mother's pearl necklace, and called it pearl green tea. In Taichung, Lin Hsiu Hui of Chun Shui Tang said she poured tapioca balls into her Assam tea at a staff meeting in 1987 or 1988, and it became the chain's top seller.
Shaken before the pearls
The pearls landed in a busy drink culture. In 1949 Chang Fan Shu opened a tea shop selling tea shaken in cocktail shakers, which gave it a silky top of fine air bubbles: 'foam tea'. Tea shops boomed in the 1980s as Taiwan's economy grew fast. In 2009 Hanlin and Chun Shui Tang took their rivalry to court. A decade later, in 2019, the court ruled that bubble tea is a drink anyone may make, so nobody owns it.
Why people say Japan
Japan runs through the story. Chun Shui Tang's founder, Liu Han-chieh, began serving tea cold after seeing cold coffee on a trip to Japan. Bubble tea reached Japan in the late 1990s but made little impression until the 2010s; Chun Shui Tang opened its first shop outside Taiwan in Tokyo in 2013. Then a craze took off: in 2018 'tapiru', slang for drinking tapioca tea, topped a survey of middle-school girls' slang.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Bubble tea ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Chun Shui Tang ↗ · cnn.com ↗
