Hadong: bushes in a wood
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Hadong’s tea grows on the lower slopes of Jirisan, along the Seomjin river valley, in a pattern that looks to an outsider like neglect and is not: seed-grown bushes of varying size, spread through and around woodland and terracing, on ground too steep and too irregular for machinery. The plants are genetically variable because they come from seed rather than from cuttings, which is now rare in commercial tea anywhere and gives Hadong tea a character that is not reproducible by planting a cultivar. Picking is entirely by hand and the picking window is short. The district markets itself on age and continuity, with a claim to the oldest tea cultivation in Korea attached to a particular site and repeated in all local material. TeaHQ does not evaluate that claim, which is a specific historical assertion about a first, and notes only that it is the local account and that such claims are contested more or less everywhere they are made.
Boseong: rows on a contour
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Boseong is the other model entirely — large contour-planted estates on rolling hills, laid out in continuous curved rows, mechanically manageable, and by a considerable margin Korea’s largest producing district. It is also the most photographed tea landscape in the country and one of the most photographed in Asia: the rows are used as a backdrop for advertising, television and wedding photography, and the estates run as visitor attractions with walkways, a light festival and a substantial tourist trade alongside the tea. The plantings there are of comparatively recent origin as commercial tea goes, established through the twentieth century rather than inherited. For a buyer, the practical difference is that Boseong tea is available in volume at a consistent standard and Hadong tea is not. For the districts, the difference is a whole economic model: one sells scale and visitors, the other sells scarcity and provenance, and both sell a green tea made in broadly the same way.
The grades, and what the names mean
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Korean green tea is sold by picking date, with a named sequence — ujeon for leaf picked before the seasonal marker in late April, then sejak, jungjak and daejak for successively later and larger picking. The names are used consistently across producers, which makes Korean tea unusually legible on the shelf: the grade tells you when it was picked and, by implication, how small the leaf was. Prices step sharply between them and the earliest grades are made in very small quantities. The system has the same weakness as every date-based grading system, which is that an early picking date is a proxy for quality and not quality itself: a poorly made ujeon is worse than a well-made sejak, and the label cannot tell you which you have. TeaHQ records the sequence because a reader will meet it immediately, and notes that within Korea the later grades are what most people actually drink.
Jeju, and the part of Korean tea that is industrial
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Jeju island holds large modern plantations established by corporate investment in the second half of the twentieth century, on volcanic soil and flat enough ground for full mechanisation, supplying a substantial share of Korean production including material for bottled drinks and for a well-known confectionery and cosmetics trade built on green tea. It is a very different enterprise from either mainland district and it is generally left out of accounts of Korean tea culture, which prefer the temple garden. Leaving it out is a choice about which Korea is being described. TeaHQ includes it because a catalogue that describes only the small, old and hand-picked end of a producing country will systematically misrepresent every producing country in the same direction. Korean tea is a small industry with an industrial component, a heritage component and a revived practice culture, and the three are connected by supply rather than by sentiment.