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As you pass through the galleries, palaces, and streets of Seoul, it’s hard not to be captivated by the place. The rush of heavy traffic is softened by the elegance of white-gloved policemen and the effortless sophistication of the people moving through it. But if you sneak down the tight alleys splitting off from major promenades, you end up in a different world. One filled with the jovial shouting of locals helping themselves to heaping portions of barbecue, crackling and steaming from the electric grates at their knees.
Seoul, like much of urbanized East Asia, seems to operate in these dichotomies while somehow making them work. Except this bustling metropolis has something missing.
After a day’s walk past coffee shop after café after Starbucks, I stopped and said aloud: where’s the tea?
I asked around, nobody had a clean answer.
But the numbers are clear. Koreans consume about 3.9 kilograms of coffee per person each year. Tea? Just 0.16 kilograms, roughly 4% of the volume.
It wasn’t a single factor but rather compounding events that led to one of the world’s oldest tea cultures at times feeling disconnected from its own roots. Through my research, conversations, and reflection, there seem to be three main contributors: time, urbanization, and war.
Tea arrived in Korea from the neighboring Tang dynasty during the Silla period in the 7th century. This was roughly the same time as the Ancient Tea Horse Road began between China and Tibet. But where the Tibetans embraced tea for practical reasons related to their diet, Korea’s adaptation was primarily spiritual, in line with the country’s deep Buddhist practice.
So tea grew in popularity throughout the Silla period, before really hitting its golden age during the Goryeo dynasty. But power shifted in 1392, when the Joseon took over. Their Neo-Confucian ideals emphasized education, moral conduct, and social order. That differed from the Buddhist institutions that had played a central role during the Goryeo period.
And while a discrepancy existed, the departure was really a matter of the Joseon consolidating power by reducing the influence of institutions that came before it. As temples lost land, wealth, and influence, tea faded alongside them.
So while that explains why tea wasn’t particularly present in 1640, it doesn’t begin to explain why tea still feels marginalized today.
Tea art as a whole has undergone a massive revival since the 1980s, led by Taiwan and spread throughout Asia. It helped restore centuries of history in just a few decades. So while there is some growth in the Korean tea market, it’s still dwarfed by that of its neighbors.
The first reason is likely the most intuitive. It’s difficult to change habits in a single generation. But after three, few people retain firsthand memories of the old ways. After fifteen? Even the most determined preservation efforts struggle to survive. I suspect that while tea outlasted a 150-year dormancy in China, recovering from Korea’s 500-year decline was more difficult.
Coffee, the beverage that came to dominate Korea, is known for thriving in urban environments (a fact that I plan to explore further in future chapters), while tea has historically done well in both rural and urban places. Both China and Korea were heavily agrarian in the 1950s with between 80% and 90% of each population living rurally. Today, both are predominantly urban. But the pace and timing of that shift tells a more complete story. By the time tea began reviving in the 1980s and early 1990s, Korea was already 75% urban while China was still just 20%.
Korea’s population was primed for a coffee revolution. China, still overwhelmingly rural, followed a different path.
But what is most interesting to me is the third point: war. As I settled into the only real tea shop I happened upon in central Seoul, I got to know the owner, Teo. A Chinese immigrant himself, he had come to Korea to study business and stayed. Eventually I got comfortable enough to ask the question I couldn’t stop thinking about: why did he think Koreans seemed to have such a preference for coffee over tea?
“It all starts with history,” he began. He believes Chinese support of North Korea pushed many South Koreans toward Western, and particularly American, cultural influences and away from what they view as inherited Chinese habits. Even if that inheritance happened 1,500 years ago.
That was the lightbulb moment for me.
While American staples had reached East Asia for generations, the Korean and Vietnam Wars brought unprecedented numbers of Americans into daily contact with those local populations. Some of the habits they brought with them stayed long after they left.
Today, more than 70% of adults in South Korea consume at least one cup of coffee daily. On average, the country consumes 416 cups of coffee per person per year, 3 times the global rate.
Seoul has around 20,000 coffee shops (85 per square mile), serving its 9.5 million residents. That’s more than three times the shop-density of New York City with 28 cafés per square mile, while serving a similar population of 8.5 million. This trend goes beyond the city. There is a coffee shop in South Korea for every 510 people, one of the densest on earth.
Eventually I was led to Insadong, the old tea neighborhood just outside the palace walls. But what I found wasn’t particularly moving. As I hopped from shop to shop, most tea was served in bags and uninspired glass mugs, the kind of afterthought I was used to back home.
Of course tea still exists in South Korea. Boseong still grows it. Tea houses still operate. Tea associations still meet. But compared to China, Japan, or even their Northern counterparts, its visibility in everyday urban life feels remarkably diminished.
Instead, South Korea’s most consumed beverage is one that can’t meaningfully be grown domestically and only became commonplace within a lifetime, while one of its oldest traditions survives largely at the margins of daily life.
Whether that’s progress or loss, evolution or devolution, or simply change is subjective opinion. But it raises a question that’s becoming increasingly relevant all over the world: how did a drink with fifteen centuries of history come to feel less Korean than the one that arrived only a couple generations ago?
Sources
USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. Coffee and Tea Market Brief: Republic of Korea, 2025.
International Coffee Organization. Coffee Development Report.
The World Bank. Urban Population (% of Total Population) – China.
The World Bank. Urban Population (% of Total Population) – Republic of Korea.
Kim, Mee-Hyang. The Use and Culture of Tea in Korea. Proceedings of the International Conference on Tea Culture, 2001.
China Heritage Quarterly. “Feeling Your Way. The Cultivated Aesthetic in Taiwanese Tea Art”
Super interesting. I can’t believe it has more coffee shops than NYC.