On my third day in Austin, my American friend excitedly took me to her latest obsession with the drink. "Have you ever heard of 'chicha sanqian'? Along the way, she struggled around her tongue, seemingly trying to pronounce an Asian-like pronunciation. I didn't understand, and assumed she was talking about a chain of specialty coffee shops that resembled "blue bottles" — until the car pulled up to a bubble tea shop with a huge Chinese on the front that said "Eat Tea 3,000".
The drink that excites this young American is bubble tea?
It's a pity that "Three Thousand Teas" closed on the same day, and she turned around and drove the car to the door of a store with a huge neon sign next door. "terrazzo", the name of the store makes it impossible to guess the products, has a strong sense of design and its own magazine on the table, giving people a lot of energy and enthusiasm.
Wait, how is it still bubble tea?
I've been super into lychees lately! The pure-blooded American girl, who had never been to Asia before, expertly uttered "Melon Lychee Strawberry Jasmine Tea" to the salesperson, while I watched the Vietnamese-style "Colorful Leaf Milk Cap Cream Green with Pearls" and the brain-piercing "Passion Fruit Strawberry Matcha Cold Brew with Tea Jelly and Chia Seeds" on the menu.
7.$5 **, close to 60 yuan a cup, not only I, a Chinese, think ** outrageous, for Americans who are usually used to spending $4 to buy coffee, it is not cheap. But the variety of ingredients infused with oriental culture seems to have a mysterious appeal to these native-born Americans. In just half an hour, I saw a steady stream of young people of all colors coming to buy bubble tea. Some buy it and drive away, while others use it as a café and sit down to work and chat. On the contrary, I, a Chinese, faced with this "unfamiliar" drink that encompasses the taste of the whole Southeast Asia in front of me, I don't know where to start.
Not only the United States, but bubble tea is taking the world by storm. Searches for Boba Tea on YouTube have more than 1 million traffic, and on Instagram, the number of posts containing Boba has exceeded 30 million. One of the most popular articles in the British "Times" recently is "A British bubble tea company is preparing to dominate the world", and just two weeks ago, Biden was also spotted in a bubble tea shop in Las Vegas, chatting while drinking milk tea.
The last Chinese drink that was so respected by the world was Chinese tea 400 years ago. After 400 years, another form of Chinese tea is once again on the march, and it seems that it is ready to regain the status of "the world's number one drink"?
The popular overseas bubble tea is not called milk tea, it has a more catchy name: boba - specifically refers to the pearls in milk tea that are black and oily, shining with a hazy soft light, and the mouth is elastic and tenacious, which is a new word tailored for "bubble tea" in the English world.
The boba taste of Q bombs fascinated the world. YouTube influencer Joshua Weissman describes it as an ASMR in the mouth, the pronunciation of "bo-ba" - the lips are slightly open in the center, and two silent plosives collide with the faint oral airflow, just like Nabokov's "lo-li-ta". Whether it is a giant boba with a big brain, or a transparent boba with molecular cooking technology, any boba-related ** on the Internet can explode, and even the simplest "how to make boba" can get more than 10 million clicks**. In the comment area, you can read that foreigners from all over the world are seriously sharing which up master boba's recipe is the simplest, and the experience of the mistakes made last time is no less enthusiastic than that of them watching Bruce Lee's movies to learn Chinese kung fu in the 80s.
Lisa, an American friend, was attracted by the taste of boba at first. It was in the summer of '21: "I went to New York with my cousin and she took me to Chinatown and that was my first BOBA drink". Lisa clearly remembers the moment when Boba was drawn into her mouth: several gurgles entered her mouth, slippery and soft, I didn't know whether to bite or swallow, the tip of her tongue ran over the surface, and found that there was a kind of sweetness that could not be left for a long time, "Who invented it?" It's amazing! Under Lisa's leadership, her husband went into the pit, followed by her husband's brother, her husband's brother's girlfriend....
One to ten, ten to hundred, bubble tea with a unique magical taste, into the life of foreigners.
BOBA has been in the overseas market for more than 10 years. Around 2010, bubble tea began to appear in Chinatowns in major cities around the world, but at that time, the consumer group was mainly Chinese, and the chain brands of Heytea or Tea Baidao had not yet debuted. The creamer products of these small family workshops not only do not have English menus, but the names of the shops are also translated strangely: bubble tea, Chinese milk tea, which makes the old foreigner monk scratch his head.
There are also Chinese people who believe that bubble tea can be held high. Today, Boboq, a bubble tea shop all over Europe, had more than 100 chain stores in Germany and more than 1,300 in Europe at its peak. However, the founder, Zhu Guixi, also remembers that "on the opening day in 2010, only 15 cups were sold, and foreigners had no idea whether the pearl should be spit out or swallowed."
Hundreds of millions of Chinese students studying abroad and Asian Chinese scattered around the world are the main driving force behind the "Chinese milk tea" out of Asia and into the world. Xiao Li, who is studying in Russia, told me that bubble tea shops began to appear in St. Petersburg's main business districts about three years ago, and at first Chinese students were drinking, but now the queue is half European and half Asian. Russians have always liked to drink dairy products, and it is not surprising that they will like Chinese milk tea with a strong milky taste. ”
Unlike coffee, bubble tea has unlimited possibilities and creativity, allowing every young person who is building themselves to express their individuality. Lisa, who has recently become fascinated by lychee, says that this sweet and sour taste in her mouth is full of rose-like aroma, which she has not tried in other American foods, as if a rose garden has bloomed in her mouth; A super influencer with two million followers on Instagram declared that matcha + milk + pearls may be the world's best gift to mankind, and there is no one.
For foreigners, milk tea is a whole new universe. What is a milk cap, what is a bobo, what is aloe vera, what is a pearl, and what exactly are the subtle differences in taste between each other? They are like babbling children, helping each other and earnestly seeking advice from the Asians around them who are learning the tenth level of milk tea.
This curiosity and pursuit of Chinese drinks is not the first time. 400 years ago, foreigners who were new to Chinese tea showed the same enthusiasm.
Remember to bring me a pot of your best tea", said Richard Wickham, then representative of the British East India Company in Japan, in a letter to the merchants of Macao, in 1615, referring to Chinese tea for the first time.
Before that, the nobles of the Empire on which the sun never set had never tasted any kind of drink, and they could smell it clearly and aromatically, and the tongue would be fragrant when they drank it. "[Chinese] Tea leaves about the size of a walnut would be put into a ceramic utensil and brewed in hot water," the British writer Pacches later described in his travelogue. In their eyes, this oriental plant has a mellow and complex taste, rich and fragrant, and can also make people feel uplifted and prolonged. By 1657, tea had become the top item on the menu of London coffee houses, selling for $3 per pound£15 – you know, at the time, a British property lawyer was earning £20 a year.
This is the first time that Chinese tea has become popular on the world stage, and it has become so popular that almost everyone from the upper class to the middle class elite, from the United Kingdom to the whole of Europe, is crazy about Chinese tea. The thirteen lines in Guangzhou, the top three to the outside world will always have tea; The Jin merchants of Shanxi even sold Fujian tea directly to Kyakhta (present-day Russian territory).
It's a pity that we didn't know what we had at that time" until the Europeans sent Robert Fortune, a plant hunter, to take live seedlings of tea from China and try to plant them in India; In order to reverse the ** deficit caused by tea, Britain began to sell opium....
The rest of the story, everyone knows.
The Chinese tea plant, which has taken on a new identity in India and Sri Lanka, has been made into black tea with a more prominent aroma and taste, but the "disadvantage" is bitterness. Europeans who have not learned how to deal with the relationship between tea and denim choose to add milk and sugar to their tea, but probably they also feel that this is a "desecration" of tea, so they never say that they drink milk tea, but take the trouble to emphasize: I drink tea, but with milk and sugar (I like tea, with milk and sugar).
Originally, tea began to diverge from this point on, heading for two different paths in China and the West. Who would have thought that 400 years later, the same tea-based beverage originating from China would inherit the banner of history and become the world's latest darling after adding pearls and milk?
Not to mention the bubble tea shops that come and go in Chinatown, some of them are branded as the first generation of milk tea chains, and some still maintain the taste of 20 years ago; From Southeast Asia to the Middle East, and then to Europe, America and Oceania, there are also many brand conceptualized bubble teas in the local area.
These overseas successors of Chinese tea have chosen to directly integrate the concept of pearl and milk tea into the more familiar and favorite beverage styles of foreigners. For example, bubbleology in the United Kingdom has a special milk tea cocktail "wine"; Terrazzo in the United States even cut coconut fruit and jelly into the shape of small stars and hearts that young American girls prefer - these are the birthplace of bubble tea, Chinese bubble tea shops, and "overseas limited editions" that cannot be drunk
We're starting to strike, too. In February 2023, Mixue Bingcheng opened its first non-Southeast Asian store in Australia; In December of the same year, Heytea opened its first overseas store in Times Square, New York. When they first go overseas, they are still exploring the way to play and think of "going to sea to fight", and the foreign friends who come here are still learning "why taro paste sticks to the roof of the mouth" in the face of too Chinese milk tea....Whether Chinese tea drinks can achieve a new victory in this "war" to seize the world's beverage trend cannot be easily concluded for the time being.
But it's just getting started. 400 years ago, tea became the target of the competition between the East and the West because of its unique flavor. 400 years later, perhaps we can look at the story from a different perspective.
At the local Austin bubble tea shop at the beginning, I finally chose the "passion fruit strawberry matcha cold brew with tea jelly and chia seeds", which was cut into small jellies in the shape of stars and an absolutely unique blend of flavors, which I had never encountered in China in the past 20 years. The British biscuit milk tea and cocktail milk tea created by the British bubbleology also fully aroused my curiosity. And our blasting Bo Bo and 30 national style series of milk tea is also worth exporting to the world.
On social networking, overseas students commented that this worldwide bubble tea craze is "a group assignment completed by people all over the world", isn't this an idea to open up the pattern? If one day, it is really bubble tea that "unifies" the world with taste, what a dreamy and sweet fairy tale it will be.