Bubble Tea

30-second overview: In 1987, Lin Xiu-hui, a shop manager at a tea house in Taichung, poured tapioca balls into milk tea during a staff meeting — an offhand experiment. Within months, that single drink outsold every other beverage on the menu. Thirty-eight years later, that moment spawned a global industry worth roughly $3.5 billion, earned bubble tea its own emoji 🧋 on every smartphone, and set Taiwanese and mainland Chinese brands against each other in a battle over who gets to claim the title of "inventor."

In 1987, on Siwei Street in Taichung, at a tea house that would later become Chun Shui Tang, manager Lin Xiu-hui was presiding over a staff meeting. On the table sat the ingredients she had bought that morning on a motorcycle trip to the Jian Guo Market, including a bowl of white tapioca balls — a Taiwanese snack she had loved since childhood. On impulse, she poured the balls into the Assam milk tea beside her and took a sip.

"Everyone at that meeting fell in love with the drink, and within a few months it was outselling all our other iced teas," Lin told a CNN reporter years later, without the tone of deliberate exaggeration — more like someone describing a small accident she herself hadn't seen coming.

That accident would later land her in a courtroom battle that lasted over a decade.

A Lawsuit That Lasted Ten Years — With No Winner

Lin's version is only half the story.

Tu Zong-he, founder of Hanlin Tea Room in Tainan, tells another: after opening his shop in 1986, he spotted translucent white tapioca balls at a market one day, had a flash of inspiration, tried combining them with milk tea, and named the drink after the pearls the balls resembled. Both stories take place in mid-to-late 1980s Taiwan — one in the north, one in the south — and both claim to be first.

Chun Shui Tang's version is more precise: founder Liu Han-jie opened a beverage shop on Siwei Street in Taichung in 1983; in 1987, then-manager Lin Xiu-hui accidentally concocted bubble tea during a staff meeting, after which it was test-sold and officially launched. Chun Shui Tang has even stated that the head of Hanlin Tea Room personally visited Chun Shui Tang to observe and learn.

The question of "who was first" eventually went to court. Chun Shui Tang and Hanlin Tea Room sued each other, and the litigation dragged on for over a decade. In 2019, a Taiwanese court ruled: bubble tea is a novel beverage, not a patented product; any person or shop can prepare it, and there is no need to fight over who the originator is. Neither party could obtain a patent. Nobody won, and nobody lost.

📝 Curator's note
The question "who invented bubble tea" may have already lost its meaning in Taiwan itself. The more worthwhile question is: why did it take a decade-long lawsuit to confirm the "birthplace" of a single drink? With the global bubble tea market approaching NT$100 billion, the real stakes in that lawsuit were clearly about more than just historical narrative rights.

26,000 Shops — More Than Convenience Stores

Whichever tea house made bubble tea first, Taiwan's obsession with the drink has long since outgrown the range of the "inventor" debate.

According to statistics from Taiwan's Ministry of Finance, the number of beverage shops of all types hit a record high in April 2022, reaching 26,000 — nearly 10,000 more than all the convenience stores in Taiwan combined, and a 67.6% increase over the previous decade. A single alley in Taipei might have 50 Lan, Ching Shin Fu Chuan, CoCo, and MACU lined up side by side, competing for customers. Walk into any one of them, and you face more decisions than you'd expect: full sugar, half sugar, light sugar, no sugar; extra ice, light ice, no ice, regular ice; tapioca, coconut jelly, taro balls, pudding… In Taiwan, a cup of bubble tea is a highly personalized choice, not a standardized product.

The global market is even more staggering. Multiple market research firms estimate the global bubble tea market at approximately $3.5 billion (roughly NT$112 billion) in 2024, with projections of $6–7 billion by 2034. Taiwanese brands are the origin point of this market: CoCo has over 5,000 locations worldwide, Gong Cha over 2,000, and brands like The Alley and Chatime continue expanding overseas. Chun Shui Tang still sells over 2 million cups of bubble tea per year in Taiwan alone.

This globalization followed an interesting path: it was not government-driven cultural diplomacy, nor a carefully designed market expansion strategy by a major brand. Bubble tea's first step into the world was powered by immigrant nostalgia — Taiwanese immigrants in Los Angeles, Taiwanese immigrants in Vancouver, who wanted a taste of home, opened shops locally, and ended up making their neighbors fall in love with the drink too. This is the most typical path of diffusion for Taiwanese street food (台灣小吃): not export, but diffusion; not strategy, but life.

📊 By the numbers
Global bubble tea market size (2024): ~$3.5 billion (~NT$112 billion)
Taiwan hand-shaken beverage shops (2022 peak): 26,000+, up 67.6% over ten years
CoCo worldwide locations: 5,000+
Gong Cha worldwide locations: 2,000+
Chun Shui Tang annual bubble tea sales: over 2 million cups

2019: Six Hours in Line in Tokyo

Bubble tea's journey from Taiwanese tea houses to the world was not a single explosion but a wave of successive surges.

In the late 1990s, the first wave landed in North America and Southeast Asia alongside Taiwanese immigrants. In the 2000s, chain branding transformed it from a diaspora community drink into a shared language among young people across Asia. In the 2010s, Instagram globalized its visual language — the image of a transparent cup, black tapioca pearls, and a wide straw was born for social media.

But the most dramatic phenomenon happened in Japan in 2019.

That summer, a sign appeared outside The Alley in Tokyo reading "estimated wait: 5 hours." The number was later updated to 6. Japanese media called it the "third tapioca boom" (第三波タピオカブーム). Bubble tea–flavored lipstick, bubble tea salad, and bubble tea–flavored snacks flooded the market. Young Japanese women would go out in full bubble tea–themed outfits — lipstick, eye shadow, clothing — just for a check-in photo.

What most Japanese consumers didn't realize was that the craze they were chasing had started with an offhand experiment at a staff meeting in Taichung thirty years earlier. One Japanese netizen joked on social media: "You could fly to Taiwan, drink a cup, and fly back in the time you spend waiting in line."

The following year, bubble tea completed an even stranger identity leap: it became a political symbol.

🧋 One Cup of Tea, One Democratic Alliance

In April 2020, Chinese nationalist online accounts launched a harassment campaign against a Thai celebrity, which unexpectedly pushed Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and Thai internet users to the same side. The hashtag #MilkTeaAlliance went viral — the name referencing the fact that all three places drink tea with milk, while mainland Chinese tea culture traditionally takes it black, a small but sharp culinary difference.

Milk tea became a kind of lifestyle password: tea with milk = democracy and openness; plain tea = the opposing political order. The metaphor was crude enough to be funny, yet it was genuinely and repeatedly invoked at protest sites in Myanmar, Belarus, and Thailand throughout 2020. Using a food symbol, it linked Taiwan's democratic experience with Southeast Asian civic movements in a way no diplomat could have managed.

That same year, Unicode 13.0 officially added the 🧋 bubble tea emoji, giving the drink its own face on every smartphone.

📝 Curator's note
The Milk Tea Alliance translated geopolitics into the language of phone stickers through the small act of adding milk — perhaps the most absurd yet truest moment in bubble tea history: a commoner's drink born out of night market culture (夜市文化) accidentally becoming a symbol of transnational democratic solidarity. It wasn't even trying.

500 Calories Per Cup, and the Health Conversation No One Wants to Hear

Any honest bubble tea story must confront the number that makes nutritionists frown.

A full-sugar, regular-ice cup of bubble tea runs approximately 400–600 calories, with around 50–70 grams of sugar — equivalent to an entrée box meal, or more than double the WHO's recommended daily sugar intake. Dr. Martin Lee, head of nephrology at the National University Hospital of Singapore, has stated directly: "The sugar in bubble tea may worsen diabetes, leading to kidney damage or even failure." Academic research published on PubMed has also noted that for young Asian adults who drink bubble tea daily, the health risks are comparable to those of sugar-sweetened soft drinks and represent a public health concern that cannot be ignored.

This is not sensationalist alarmism but a real risk that emerges when bubble tea shifts from an occasional treat to a daily habit. Those 26,000 beverage shops tracked by Taiwan's Ministry of Finance are not just an entrepreneurship statistic — they are also a public health warning signal. Taiwan's Ministry of Health and Welfare has repeatedly required chain hand-shaken beverage brands to display mandatory calorie labels, but the majority of consumers still choose full sugar after seeing a "520 kcal" label — a small fact that illustrates just how hard human behavior change is.

In 2011, Taiwanese food culture suffered an even more direct blow: the plasticizer DEHP was illegally added to clouding agents used in foods and beverages, affecting bubble tea and other hand-shaken drinks. Taiwan's Food and Drug Administration ultimately confirmed that 965 products were contaminated, of which 206 had been exported to 22 countries. The scandal devastated the Taiwanese beverage industry's business in markets like Hong Kong and Malaysia and became the direct catalyst for a major overhaul of Taiwan's food safety regulations.

Environmental concerns have never gone away either. The global wave of single-use plastic straw bans presented bubble tea with a practical engineering problem: paper straws soften in water, metal straws conduct heat too well, and compostable materials are too expensive. Progress on sustainable packaging for this drink has been far slower than its brand marketing pace.

"New Tea Drinks" and a Diluted Story

There is another, quieter competition taking place.

Mainland Chinese "new tea drink" brands — HeyTea, Nayuki, Chagee — have been expanding rapidly around the world in recent years, with some brands' overseas footprint now matching or exceeding that of certain Taiwanese brands. What is more noteworthy is their marketing language: the Taiwanese origin of bubble tea is gradually being diluted in these brands' narratives by vague terms like "tea drink culture" and "Asian tea innovation." For Taiwanese brands, narrative rights over the "place of origin" are becoming a battle just as important as commercial competition — and arguably harder to fight.

Business can be competed on capital and store-opening speed; narrative rights depend on whose story more people remember and believe.

The Taiwanese government and private brands are not unaware of this. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs' overseas bubble tea cultural events, the Overseas Community Affairs Council's promotion through Taiwanese diaspora communities, Chun Shui Tang's insistence on keeping Lin Xiu-hui's story pinned to the top of its homepage — all of these are acts of defensive narrative engineering, trying to keep the "Made in Taiwan" label from being diluted. But in the global market, consumers drink the experience, not the origin story, and this is a battle with no finish line.

An Action That Keeps Going

Lin Xiu-hui's 1987 act remains the most prominent story on Chun Shui Tang's homepage to this day. That cup of tapioca milk tea outselling every other drink within months — that fact alone is the closest thing this beverage has to a mythological origin.

But in 2026, keeping the words "invented in Taiwan" at the core of this drink's story requires far more effort than the original moment of pouring tapioca balls into tea. How many people around the world drink a cup of bubble tea every day without knowing or caring where it came from? That number is virtually impossible to calculate.

That moment, of course, had no idea what it was doing. Great accidents never do.

References

• Chun Shui Tang Official Website: The Invention of Bubble Tea (primary source)
• CNN Travel: The rise of bubble tea, one of Taiwan's most beloved beverages (includes Lin Xiu-hui quote)
• ETtoday: Who invented bubble tea? Chun Shui Tang and Hanlin Tea Room sued each other for 10 years — the court has ruled (2019 ruling report)
• Taiwan Hand-Shaken Beverage Market Data Analysis (Taiwan Ministry of Finance statistics) (primary statistical source)
• TIME: What Is the Milk Tea Alliance? (Milk Tea Alliance background)
• Maximize Market Research: Global Bubble Tea Market Size 2024 (global market data)
• PubMed: 2011 Taiwan food scandal — plasticizer contamination (academic primary source, 965-product contamination data)
• National University Hospital Singapore: What happens if you drink too much bubble tea? (Dr. Martin Lee quote source)

Related topics: night market culture, Taiwanese street food (台灣小吃), Taiwanese food culture (台灣飲食文化).