Night market
- Kaohsiung
- Tue, Thu–Sun 17:00–00:00
Known forTaiwanese Fried Chicken · Stinky Tofu · Sweet Potato Balls
In the kitchen
How it’s prepared
The base is usually strongly brewed black tea (green tea and oolong are common too), combined with syrup, milk or non-dairy creamer and ice in a shaker cup and shaken, by hand or by machine, until a fine froth forms. That shaking is where the term 手搖飲, “hand-shaken drink,” comes from. Pearls are small balls of tapioca starch and brown sugar. They arrive hard and dry, are boiled until translucent and chewy, then held in syrup to keep their sweetness and bounce. They stiffen as they sit, so shops cook them in batches through the day.
The cup is normally sealed with plastic film by a machine and punctured with a wide straw, a takeaway format that helped put a drink shop on nearly every block. Sweetness and ice are graded a little differently from shop to shop, but you will usually see 全糖 (full), 少糖 (less), 半糖 (half), 微糖 (light) and 無糖 (none) for sugar, and 正常冰 (regular), 少冰 (less), 微冰 (light) and 去冰 (none) for ice. Just say them when you order.
Origins
History and origins
Before pearl milk tea, Taiwan in the 1980s already had a fashion for “foam tea” (泡沫紅茶): tea shaken hard with syrup and ice until frothy. Liu Han-chieh, founder of the Taichung tea house Chun Shui Tang, is said to have started selling shaken iced tea after seeing iced coffee in Japan. Who first dropped tapioca balls into milk tea is disputed, and both claims rest on the shops' own accounts.
Chun Shui Tang says that Lin Hsiu-hui poured tapioca balls into her milk tea during a meeting in 1987 (sources give anything from 1986 to 1988), her colleagues liked it, and it became a bestseller. The Hanlin Tea Room in Tainan says its founder, Tu Tsong-he, saw white tapioca balls on sale at Yamuliao market in 1986 and was inspired to add them to milk tea; Hanlin still offers both white and black pearls. The two companies went to court against each other from 2009, and in 2019, about a decade later, the court ruled that bubble tea is not a patented product and that it did not need to decide who invented it, so the question remains open. By the mid-1990s pearl milk tea was on tea house menus, and the machine-sealed takeaway cup later turned it into the drink most of us know.
