The New Yorker:

In China, a new generation of milk-tea chains—with design schemes that evoke everything from Communist-era factory floors to spaceships—sell not only beverages but also imagined worlds.

By Han Zhang

As a nineties kid who grew up drinking bubble tea, I long ago wrote the drink off as a cheap indulgence, whose satisfying sugar rush quickly metabolizes into lingering regret. That changed last fall, when I visited China for the first time in years and encountered the country’s new generation of milk-tea chains—establishments that sell not only beverages but also imagined worlds. At Chayan Yuese, a chain whose aesthetic celebrates the culture of antiquity, the staff greeted me as xiaozhu (“your ladyship”). I ordered a “valley orchid latte,” and a brochure in the style of ink-wash painting instructed me to start with the “mountain peak” of the drink’s milky foam, before eventually reaching the “foothills” of richly mixed Ceylon tea. At Chagee, which uses cups printed with cobalt patterns reminiscent of blue-and-white porcelain, choosing a product on the menu was like selecting a literary adventure: I settled on a jasmine milk tea named for Bo Ya, a legendary musician of the Spring and Autumn period, some twenty-five hundred years ago, who is said to have broken his zither after the death of the only friend who he thought understood his music. At 3Bro Factory, the nostalgia fast-forwarded to the Communist era: in a red-and-green space designed to recall a state-owned factory floor, it served bougie drinks, such as a silky blend of milk and Tieguanyin oolong. If a Brooklynite had shown up in Novesta plimsolls and a two-hundred-dollar worker’s jacket, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.

People have been using milk or cream to mellow the bitter tannins of black tea for centuries. In the nineteenth century, the British began complementing their afternoon teas, brewed using Indian leaves, with milk and sugar; in the Himalayas, nomadic people still add yak butter or yak milk, following time-honored habits. In East Asia, though, the most influential formulation of milk tea—a mélange of black tea and creamer, accompanied by tapioca pearls—originated in Taiwan in the eighties, before travelling to the mainland just as the Chinese economy was rising. Although the addition of milk was not a traditional feature of Chinese tea culture, the drink became incredibly popular, spawning an industry dominated by a handful of chains, though one could also buy it at tiny storefronts and streetside stalls. (By now, the drink has become a common sight in Chinatowns worldwide, including in the U.S., where it is usually called “bubble tea” or “boba.”)

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