ORIGIN
Although two separate tea houses in Taiwan claim to have invented boba tea in the 1980s, the most accepted version includes the founder of Chun Shui Tang Teahouse (æ˜¥æ°´å ‚) in Taichung, Liu Han-Chieh.
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According to myth, he first came up with the idea of serving Chinese tea cold in the early 1980s after visiting Japan where he saw coffee served cold. Shortly after in 1988, his product development manager, Ms. Lin Hsiu Hui, was in a staff meeting and had brought with her a typical Taiwanese dessert called fen yuan (a sweetened tapioca pudding). After she dumped the tapioca balls into her iced tea and drank it, everyone at the meeting was fascinated with the drink.
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It was placed on the menu thereafter and quickly outsold all of other teas after being placed on the menu.
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The second one is the Hanlin Tea House in Tainan, a city in Southern Taiwan. There was a man named Tu Tsong-He who added white tapioca balls to his milk tea. The color white made the tapioca balls look like “pearls”, which eventually gave it the name “pearl milk tea”. Later, they switched to the black tapioca balls by adding brown sugar into the recipe.
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There is no clear conclusion about who officially invented the drink. However, even without knowing this, the love for this drink is undeniable.