How far it fell
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
For a long stretch of Korean history tea drinking was marginal: constrained under a Confucian state that had little use for a practice associated with Buddhism, disrupted further by colonial occupation and by war, and by the middle of the twentieth century reduced to temple use and a small number of surviving gardens. Coffee, and later instant coffee, took the social space that tea occupies in neighbouring countries, and it has never given it back. Korea today is a heavy coffee-drinking country with a small tea culture, and this is the fact that most English-language writing about Korean tea leaves out. TeaHQ states it because it explains everything else. The sparseness of the sources, the small production, the price of Korean tea relative to Japanese or Chinese equivalents, and the self-conscious quality of the modern practice all follow from a near-break in transmission rather than from any lack of significance.
What rebuilding looked like
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
From the middle of the twentieth century onward, the practice was reassembled: temple lineages taught it outward, scholars recovered and republished the small classical literature, tea associations and schools were founded and set curricula, ceramicists made vessels for it, and universities added it to their teaching. Government interest in national cultural heritage supported the process, and plantings expanded in Hadong, Boseong and Jeju. The result is a practice with institutions, teachers, published texts and a national profile — assembled deliberately, in living memory, out of surviving fragments. That is not a diminished kind of tradition and this record does not present it as one. It is, however, a different kind, and it is the same kind as Taiwanese chayi: a modern construction with real historical reference points. The catalogue holds records for both, and the honest thing is to say so in each rather than to grant an unbroken lineage to whichever one is currently less examined.
Darye, dado and the argument about names
Specialists disagree. TeaHQ does not pick a winner.
The practice is called darye, tea rite, and also dado, the way of tea. The two terms are not simply synonyms and the preference between them has been argued about within Korea, partly because dado shares its characters with the Japanese term and the association is unwelcome to some practitioners given the colonial history. TeaHQ notes that the terminological question exists, is felt, and is not this catalogue’s to settle. The wider point that this record is placed to make is that the pressure to be distinct from Japan and China has shaped the modern Korean account of its own practice — toward naturalness, irregularity and the absence of prescribed choreography, defined partly in contrast to what the neighbours do. That is a normal way for a revived tradition to define itself and it is worth a reader knowing, because the contrast is frequently presented as a timeless characteristic rather than as a modern emphasis.
Where it stands now
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Small: a domestic market that has grown, festivals in the producing districts, tea shops in Seoul and in Insadong that serve traditional teas alongside Camellia sinensis, a specialist ceramics trade with a considerable international reputation, and an export presence that is negligible next to Japan’s. Much of what a Korean tea shop sells is not tea at all — grain teas, fruit and flower infusions, honeyed citron, jujube — and Korean usage groups all of them under the same word, which is a real obstacle for anyone trying to count. What travels internationally is the ceramics, and to a lesser extent the balhyocha style of oxidised leaf, which has a small but genuine following among speciality buyers. Korean green tea remains expensive relative to comparable Japanese and Chinese teas because the growing is small-scale, hand-picked and on difficult ground, and no amount of revival changes that arithmetic.