At the end of 1937, after the fall of Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out large-scale burning and looting of businesses in Nanjing, including tea houses, and carried out inhumane massacres, causing huge economic losses and social chaos to Nanjing. Among them, public entertainment venues such as tea houses were destroyed and looted to an even greater extent. Affected by this, the operation of the tea house industry has taken a sharp turn for the worse, presenting a chaotic management order and facing difficulties in industry survival. The Wang puppet regime exploited and restricted operators through administrative measures such as taxation and supervision, and the tea house industry entered a difficult stage of survival. During the occupation of Nanjing, the connotation of tea house culture underwent profound changes. The leisure space, originally focused on tea tasting, poetry singing, and chess skills exchange, has gradually been used by the Japanese puppet authorities as a place to promote their colonial ideas and enslavement education. The opera performances and topic discussions in tea houses were forced to cater to the taste of Japanese occupiers, and traditional ethnic stories and patriotic themes were deliberately suppressed or tampered with. The Japanese puppet regime also used tea houses for intelligence gathering and monitoring anti Japanese underground activities, making tea houses a potential danger. However, even in such a high-pressure environment, tea houses, as an important component of civil society, still stubbornly exist. They are not only reflections of daily life scenes, but also symbols of folk emotions and resistance spirit. Although it may seem quiet on the surface, in reality, some tea houses have become hidden contact points and intelligence exchange points for civil resistance forces and some underground resistance organizations. It can be said that the subtle interaction between tea guests hides the spark of resistance, reflecting the resilient cultural inheritance and national spirit of the Chinese people. In short, even in this difficult environment, tea house culture has not completely disappeared. Many lower class people have made tea houses an invisible cultural resistance carrier by preserving and inheriting traditional skills, as well as secretly spreading folk wisdom. This distortion and evolution reveal the complexity and resilience of the Nanjing tea house industry in a special historical period.