Chun Shui Tang teahouse invents bubble tea — tapioca pearls meet iced milk tea, 1987

Chun Shui Tang, founded in Taichung in 1983, sold iced Chinese tea after founder Liu Han-Chieh saw cold coffee in Japan. Tea was a formal, leaf-only tradition; his teahouse wanted to make it playful.

Break the snack/drink boundary: drop chewy tapioca pearls into iced milk tea, shake it, and sell one drink you can chew instead of just sip.

In 1986 the R&D team tested adding tapioca pearls — a popular Taiwanese street-snack ingredient — to their best-selling iced milk tea and iced lemon black tea. They sold it first as the manager's 'secret tea' for a week, then renamed it Bubble Tea and officially launched it in spring 1987, shaken with ice and foam.

Within months it climbed to the top of Taiwan's sales charts; the shop now averages over a million cups a year, and Taiwanese people drink roughly 100 million cups of bubble tea annually; by 2019 Chun Shui Tang ran 14 stores in Japan, and boba shops now span cities worldwide.

Bubble tea was born as a small-shop experiment. Chun Shui Tang, a teahouse in Taichung, was founded in 1983 and stood out for selling iced Chinese tea — an idea founder Liu Han-Chieh brought back from Japan, where he had seen coffee served cold. Iced tea sold unexpectedly well, and the shop kept looking for ways to make tea fun rather than formal.

The turning point came in 1986, when the R&D team — the 'Golden Tongues' — decided to revisit a childhood favorite: tapioca pearls, a chewy street-snack ingredient. After finding that chilled pearls had a uniquely fun texture, they mixed them into the shop's best-selling iced milk tea and iced lemon black tea. The drink was first sold quietly as the manager's 'secret tea' for a week; when customers responded, it was renamed 'Bubble Tea' and officially launched in the spring of 1987.

The effect was immediate and national: within months the drink reached the top of Taiwan's sales charts. Chun Shui Tang says its stores now sell over a million cups a year, and all shops in Taiwan together account for around 100 million cups of bubble tea annually. From 1990 onward, overseas immigrants carried the drink abroad — Chun Shui Tang's history even records a traveler bringing it from Taichung to Canada — and migration turned it into a global export of Taiwanese food culture.

The drink's success was big enough to fight over: Taichung's Chun Shui Tang and Tainan's Hanlin Tea Room both claimed the invention and battled in court for nearly a decade. In 2019 a Taiwanese court ruled that since bubble tea was never a patented product, no single inventor could be determined — a verdict that confirmed how completely the category had become public property.

Putting a street snack inside a formal drink made tea casual and fun for a younger generation.

Chewiness gave the drink a sensory hook no other beverage had — you eat it while you drink it.

The 'secret tea' staging turned the launch itself into word of mouth.

One cup was both drink and dessert, doubling the everyday occasions to buy it.

A tiny menu experiment can create a category when it merges two familiar pleasures — snack and drink — into one new ritual, and a playful name gives the novelty a hook to spread.

Bubble tea became one of Taiwan's most visible cultural exports. Chun Shui Tang opened its first Japan branch in 2013 and reached 14 stores there by 2019; Japanese even coined the verb 'tapiru' for drinking bubble tea, and related terms appeared in Japanese buzzword awards in 2018 and 2019. Independent chains and countless local shops adapted the format, and by 2024 stores stretched from Berlin and Brasilia to New York. The 2019 court ruling that the drink was never patented meant anyone could make and sell it — which is exactly why a teahouse experiment grew into a global beverage category.