A sweet chilled milky tea, served in a large plastic cup with a sealed lid and a thick straw to slurp up the brown jelly-like tapioca ‘pearls’ on the bottom. That’s the typical pearl tea as we got to know it throughout Asia. A drink hard to get around – it is in every Taiwanese street corner, and it has spread far beyond Asian territory to North America and other places where lots of Asians live. Guess if we were excited when we were in Taichung and heard we’re in the neighborhood of the tea house where the pearl tea

was first created! We didn’t know what to expect: a museum dedicated to pearl tea? A statue of the person who invented it? Information about how the discovery happened? Nope. Quite surprisingly there was nothing – just a tea house called Chun Shui Tang (location: N 24 09.372 - E 120 39.343) selling the drink in huge pint glasses. The tea was delicious, but where was the information? We got suspicious whether this place actually was the real deal, and sniffed around for at least an inscription or a little brochure. Finally asking the staff, we got (parts of) the story: yes, their boss is the inventor of the pearl tea, and it all happened in 1983 when he was having hot milk tea, got hungry, and took the pearls next to his tea cup and put them in the tea. Tadaa, the pearl tea was born. Alright, finally we got some kind of story. But it raised more questions than it gave

answers: why did he have those tapioca pearls there in the first place? How did he get them out of the tea without a straw? And – did Taiwanese really drink milk tea in the 80’s? The Wikipedia page about pearl tea, or 'bubble tea' as it is also known, gives a bit more information: there are two alternative origins of the pearl tea. One of the versions of the story is that the tea was created by an employee at Chun Shui Tang, but there is also a tea house in Tainan that claims to have invented the drink. Conclusion: the mystery of the pearl tea remains – maybe for the better. Some things don’t need to be explained, or exploited.

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