Where Bubble Tea Was Born — Taiwan's third city invented the world's most copied drink at Chun Shui Tang in 1986, the Rainbow Village's one-man street art covers every wall of a military village, and the National Taichung Theater is Asia's most audacious piece of contemporary architecture
Taichung (台中) is Taiwan's third-largest city and its fastest-growing — a city of 2.8 million that functions as the commercial and cultural hub of central Taiwan. Its global claim to fame is unambiguous: bubble tea (珍珠奶茶, pearl milk tea) was invented here in 1986 at Chun Shui Tang (春水堂) tea house, when product development manager Lin Hsiu Hui added tapioca balls to cold milk tea on a whim during a staff meeting and the drink spread to Taiwan, then Asia, then the world. The original Chun Shui Tang on Siming Road still exists and still serves the original recipe. The Fengjia Night Market (逢甲夜市)…
Taichung's history as a planned city begins in 1895 when Japanese colonial authorities chose it as the administrative centre for central Taiwan and built it on a grid-plan with broad tree-lined avenues, public parks, and Western-Japanese hybrid civic architecture. The Taichung City Hall (1913), Taichung Park (1902, the oldest park in Taiwan), and the former Taichung Prefecture Hall (now Taichung City Hall, 1913) survive from this era and give the downtown a distinctive Meiji-era character. The Japanese also built the 1908 West Coast Line railway and the Taichung tobacco factory (1913, now the…