Bubble tea, also called pearl tea (珍珠奶茶), is a quintessentially Taiwanese drink, but how old is the chewy tapioca ball-filled beverage, who invented it and how did it become to be so popular?
The origins of bubble tea are steeped in mystery and still hotly debated, but according to the orthodox version of events, the story begins in 1980s Taiwan.
At the time something called “bubble tea” — quite different from the drink we know today — was all the rage. Made with either black tea or green tea, brewed tea was sweetened with sugar syrup and then shaken through ice in a cocktail shaker to both chill the tea and produce a copious amount of bubbly froth at the top of the glass, similar to a “head” on a freshly poured pint of beer. The shaking was initially done by hand, but later machines were developed to automatically agitate the tea mixture.
Photo: Yang Ya-min, Taipei Times
At some point, chewy tapioca balls (粉圓) were added to bubble tea, resulting in pearl milk tea, the familiar drink we know today. Two rival Taiwanese teahouse chains — Hanlin Tea Room (翰林茶館) in Tainan and Chun Shui Tang (春水堂人文茶館) in Taichung — lay claim to conceiving the bubbly beverage.
DISPUTE OVER ORIGINS
Hanlin Tea Room insists it came up with the idea in 1986 when its founder Tu Tsung-ho (?宗和) spotted white-colored tapioca balls on sale at Tainan’s Yamuliao market. Tu had a sudden flash of inspiration and bought some of the balls home, and after cooking them through, added them to some milk tea. He found the texture pleasing and soon christened the new beverage pearl milk tea on account of the pearly, semi-translucent white tapioca balls. To this day, customers at any branch of Hanlin Tea Room can choose between either the original white tapioca balls or the more common black variety, made with brown sugar.
Photo Courtesy of Cha Cha The
However, Chun Shui Tang maintains it is the true inventor of the beverage, which it says was created by a then-20-year-old female employee, Lin Hsiu-hui (林秀慧), the following year in 1987. One day at the teahouse, Lin experimented by mixing her favorite childhood snack, tapioca balls, with iced milk tea and also lemon black tea to produce what the company claims was the world’s first cup of pearl milk tea.
The two companies became locked in a bitter dispute, filing lawsuits against each other and eventually going to court to settle the matter. However, since neither one was able to successfully patent or trademark their product, by the mid-1990s, pearl milk tea featured on the menus of Taiwan’s teahouses, which were popular hangouts for students and businessmen to relax and chew the cud in the days before the influx of coffee shops. With the introduction from abroad of machines that automatically seal the top of takeaway cups with a thin film of plastic, the modern takeaway version of the beverage was born.
ANOTHER THEORY
However, there is an intriguing alternative explanation: bubble tea’s earliest incarnation could in fact be traced back to the days of the British empire. In British Malaya (modern-day Singapore and Malaysia) an iced drink/desert, usually called cendol or chendol, began to be drunk to provide respite from the tropical heat.
Brightly-colored, worm-like gelatinous strands, usually made from rice flour or sago, are added to coconut milk which has been sweetened with sugar and combined with ice to make a refreshing drink or iced snack. It is thought that cendol may have been inspired by locals observing British expatriates adding milk to their tea and may have originated in port cities such as Malacca or Penang, where refrigeration technology from British ships would have provided the ice. Today, Cendol is a ubiquitous thirst-quencher drunk across South East Asia, including Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia and when served in a tall glass, bears an uncanny resemblance to Taiwan’s bubble tea.
Meanwhile, chewy tapioca balls, called fenyuan in Chinese, somehow made their way to Taiwan from abroad — possibly via China, after being presented to Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后) as tribute — and began to be used as an ingredient in sweet snacks at Taiwanese night markets. Contrary to the competing claims of the teahouses, perhaps the real origin of bubble tea is to be found in Taiwan’s night markets, possibly inspired by a Taiwanese night market vendor sipping on a glass of cendol during a trip to Singapore or Malaysia.
Whatever the true origin of bubble tea, today takeaway tea shops abound on almost every street corner and rival chains fiercely compete for business, continually innovating wacky new flavor combinations and textures to keep customers coming back for more. In recent years, Taiwan’s quasi-national beverage has successfully seen off the coffee juggernaut as well as multiple food safety scares and looks set to stay a permanent fixture of Taiwan’s culinary scene for many years to come.
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
There is considerable frustration and confusion among many, both in Taiwan and abroad — including in Washington — as to why the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) seems so dead set on using their legislative leverage to slash defense spending and disrupt the ability of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration to function. Are they pawns of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Are they traitors? In reality, there are multiple reasons. In the first column in this series on this subject, “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How and why the TPP and KMT help Beijing” (Sat May 16, page 12), we examined three
RSS