Chinese tea chain that went public in New York in April 2025, raising more than $400m. Its name derives from "Farewell, My Concubine", a traditional Chinese opera; the logo shows a Peking Opera singer in full headdress. Its best-selling products are tea lattes priced at 15-20 yuan ($2-3), on a par with Starbucks's top products in China. Chagee has marketed itself as a premium brand, not a budget one, and has flaunted its Chineseness rather than trying to appear Western.
The company opened its first store in Kunming, in the south-western province of Yunnan, in 2017. Most of its shops remain outside rich coastal areas. Chagee plans to have more than 1,300 shops outside China by the end of 2027, up from almost none four years earlier. As of May 2026 it had around 7,500 outlets globally, only nine of them in America—where Emily Chang, a former marketing chief for Starbucks in China, now leads its US push. America's coffee market is 28 times the size of its market for freshly made tea, according to Huachuang Securities.
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