Chun Shui Tang: From Foam Black Tea to the Bubble Tea Invention Dispute, How a Tea House Defined Global Tea Culture

Origin

In May 1983, Liu Han-Chieh founded Yanghsien Tea House on Siyuan Street in West District, Taichung City, initially a conventional shop selling traditional pot-brewed loose-leaf tea. At the time, Taiwan's tea house culture focused on elderly tea appreciation and slow, patient brewing, giving young people virtually no reason to step into a tea house. Observing that cafes and cold-drink shops were capturing the younger demographic, Liu began pondering how to make tea as convenient and take-out friendly as cold beverages and as socially engaging as coffee. Through repeated experimentation with cold-water steeping and shaker-frothing techniques, he transformed traditional hot tea into a cold, foamy, ready-to-drink new format—the prototype of foam black tea. The company was officially registered in September 1991, and the brand was renamed from Yanghsien Tea House to Chun Shui Tang, breaking away from the confines of traditional tea houses and positioning itself as a tea house chain.

Milestones

Turning Points

• The shaping of foam black tea and bubble tea between 1986 and 1988 transformed a traditional tea shop into a chain format selling ready-to-drink tea beverages, defining Chun Shui Tang's product DNA for the next forty years.
• Entering Daikanyama, Tokyo, in 2013 with an upscale tea-lounge positioning based on cultural narrative rather than cheap take-out, establishing it as a differentiated Taiwanese tea brand in the Japanese market.
• The 2024 cooling of the Japanese boom forced the business model back from social media check-in traffic to daily operations, introducing drive-thrus and refocusing on tea, marking a transition from internet hype dividends to long-termism.

Failures & Pitfalls

• The decade-long dispute between Chun Shui Tang and Hanlin Tea Room over bubble tea invention rights ended without either securing exclusive legal rights. Remaining at the narrative level and consuming massive energy without yielding commercial exclusivity, it serves as a classic lesson in squandering attention for the halo of invention.
• Having peaked in the Japanese market in 2019 by riding the global bubble tea wave, customer traffic and revenue declined significantly after the fad cooled in 2024, proving that hype-driven overseas expansion lacks counter-cyclical resilience, forcing Chun Shui Tang to course-correct through drive-thrus and format contraction.
• Faced with franchise networks like CoCo and Gong Cha scaling into thousands of stores globally, Chun Shui Tang's persistent adherence to direct management and quality positioning preserved its brand tone while effectively surrendering the volume dividends of rapid franchise scaling, leaving it in a long-term passive disadvantage in the scale race.

Core Data

• 前身成立：May 1983 (Publicly disclosed data, independent review unverified)
• 公司正式登记：September 1991 (Publicly disclosed data, independent review unverified)
• 台湾直营门店：56 stores (Publicly disclosed data, independent review unverified)
• 日本门店：14 stores (Publicly disclosed data, independent review unverified)
• 香港门店：7 stores (Publicly disclosed data, independent review unverified)
• 员工人数：Approximately 1,200 (2016) (Publicly disclosed data, independent review unverified)

Competitors / Peers

Chun Shui Tang's competitive landscape operates on two levels. At the invention-rights level, Tainan's Hanlin Tea Room has long contested the title of bubble tea's birthplace, with both sides holding differing claims while neither secured legal exclusivity. At the commercial scale level, franchise brands such as CoCo Fresh Tea & Juice, Gong Cha, and Yi Dian Dian (50岚 system) have swept the globe with thousands to tens of thousands of stores, while domestic brands like Milksha have also entered with differentiated milk teas. These competitors follow a high-volume route combining affordable take-out with franchising, pursuing an entirely different path from Chun Shui Tang's direct-management, cultural positioning, and controlled scale.