The internet and other sources are full of guesses about where bubble tea came from. But one tea shop and one woman are, by common consensus, the real, rightful creators of this hugely popular drink.
As a lifelong fan of bubble tea, I was thrilled to meet this woman when I visited her workplace and, it seems, the birthplace of all bubble tea: the Chun Shui Tang tea shop in Taichung, Taiwan.
The company's founder, Liu Han-Chieh, first hit on the idea of serving Chinese tea cold in the early 1980s, after a trip to Japan where he saw coffee being served chilled.
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That was what helped his fledgling chain earn its place in Taiwanese tea-house lore.
Then, in 1988, his product development manager, Ms Lin Hsiu Hui, was sitting in a staff meeting and had brought along a classic Taiwanese dessert called fen yuan, a sweetened tapioca pudding. Just for fun, she tipped the tapioca pearls into a cup of cold Assam tea and drank it.
"Everyone at the meeting loved the drink, and within months it had outsold all our other cold teas. Even 20 years after it appeared on the menu, bubble tea makes up 80 to 90 percent of our sales, and Taiwanese people take pride in this homegrown drink," Lin says.
Now They're Everywhere
Today, bubble tea shops fill nearly every corner of Taiwan's streets. They spread to neighboring countries such as Japan, South Korea and China, and then across the whole world. Had Lin patented the product, they could have become multimillionaires.
But Lin chose a different path.
"Our main goals at Chun Shui Tang are to promote Taiwanese tea and tea culture, and to develop innovative products," she says. "If we focus on the quality of what we make and the experience of the tea house, we're confident our guests will appreciate it and keep coming back."
I was invited to take part in a traditional tea ceremony, led by a remarkably nimble server.
"Many Taiwanese living abroad make our tea house their first stop when they get off the plane, and their last stop before heading back to the airport," Lin says. "They often ask us to expand overseas, but we hold back."
If Chun Shui Tang's tea is in such demand among Taiwanese and overseas Chinese, why not go the "Starbucks" route and expand to meet the customers?
A Devotion to the Craft
"We now have more than 30 tea houses across Taiwan, but we put a lot of effort into finding quality staff. It takes a bar worker up to six months to learn how to make the roughly 80 tea drinks on our menu, and we want to find dedicated people who genuinely love tea and tea culture," Lin says.
Chun Shui Tang's staff work with great precision and use only top-quality ingredients. The tea house uses only the finest Taiwanese-made milk, and the tapioca pearls are thrown out if they've been cooking for more than three hours.
Their bubble teas are made to order and are usually shaken rather than blended, as they are in other shops. To judge the sweetness of each drink, they use a refractometer, which measures the sweetness of drinks and food to match the customer's specification.
Think of it like telling a waiter how you'd like your steak cooked.
Despite the enormous popularity of their bubble teas and snacks, Lin and her team don't rest on their laurels.
The team is tasked with creating at least five new drinks a year, along with a range of snacks.
"We approach our teas the way wine experts do. All of our drinks can be paired with the snacks and dishes we serve. Even babies love our milk teas."
If babies love their teas, it's safe to assume that Chun Shui Tang's future success is guaranteed for at least another generation or two.
