Short answer: much less than it used to be. Since 2022, Korea’s Sungkyunkwan Confucian authority has said nine dishes are enough for a Chuseok charye (차례, cha-rye, an ancestral “tea rite” held on major holidays) table — and by 2025, the average Korean household spent under ₩300,000 building one, the lowest total in three years. This year’s charye falls on September 25, in the middle of the September 24–26 holiday stretch.
I already ran the numbers on why Chuseok doesn’t get a substitute holiday the way Liberation Day does — that’s a separate fight about calendar math. This one is about what’s actually sitting on the table itself, and why it looks less and less like the spread my mother-in-law grew up setting.
My Mother-in-Law’s Table vs. Mine: What’s Missing
My mother-in-law’s charye table still runs close to what people picture when they think of Korean ancestral rites: rows of fried jeon (전, jeon, savory pancake-style fritters of meat, fish, or vegetable dipped in egg batter), a stacked meat dish, a whole grilled fish, several kinds of namul (seasoned vegetable side dishes), and fruit arranged with actual care about which piece goes where. Ours does not. My wife and I set out songpyeon (송편, song-pyeon, half-moon rice cakes stuffed with sesame or bean paste, steamed over pine needles), one grilled fish, a bowl of namul, four kinds of fruit, and a bottle of soju. That’s it.
The gap isn’t laziness, and it isn’t really generational rebellion either. It’s that an actual institution told an actual survey sample that the shorter version is fine, and my in-laws just haven’t caught up to that news yet. I’m the one who builds spreadsheets for a living, so when my wife asked why our table looked “empty” next to her mother’s, I didn’t have a good answer beyond “because nobody made us do the rest.” That’s a strange thing to realize about a ritual you’ve been doing your whole life.
What’s Actually in Sungkyunkwan’s Nine-Dish Standard?
Sungkyunkwan (성균관, Seonggyunkwan, Korea’s centuries-old Confucian academy, whose affiliated foundation still advises on ritual etiquette) announced its standardized table on September 5, 2022, at the Korea Press Center in Seoul. The list is short on purpose: songpyeon, namul, a grilled dish, kimchi, fruit, and one drink make up a base of six — most coverage leaves the fruit count and arrangement unspecified, though one wire report names four kinds specifically. Meat, fish, and additional rice cakes are optional add-ons that count toward a nine-item ceiling, not extras stacked on top of it. Fried jeon — the dish that eats up the most prep time in most households — was explicitly called unnecessary.
The standard didn’t come out of nowhere. Ahead of the announcement, Sungkyunkwan surveyed 1,000 members of the general public and 700 yurim (유림, “the Confucian community,” the network of scholars and local practitioners who traditionally set ritual protocol) between July 28 and 31, 2022. Asked what most needed to change about the charye table, 40.7% of the general public and 41.8% of the yurim respondents both answered “simplify it” — the top answer in both groups. That’s the detail I find genuinely surprising: the people closest to the tradition wanted it cut down almost as badly as everyone else did.
Traditional Table vs. Standard vs. My Table — Side by Side
Laid out next to each other, the shrinkage is easier to see than to describe. The traditional five-row spread still taught in etiquette guides runs to roughly 20 dishes arranged by category and position; the Sungkyunkwan standard trims that to a base of six, with three more optional items capping the total at nine; ours lands somewhere under that, closer to six.
| Category | Traditional 5-row table (~20 dishes) | Sungkyunkwan standard (base 6, cap 9) | Our table |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rice cake | Songpyeon plus several other tteok varieties | Songpyeon only | Store-bought songpyeon only |
| Fried dishes (jeon) | Multiple types — fish, meat, vegetable | None required | None |
| Meat/fish | Stacked meat dish, whole fish, sometimes jokbal (pig’s trotters) | Optional add-on, one dish — counts toward the 9-item cap | One grilled fish, no meat |
| Vegetables | Three or more seasoned namul dishes | One namul dish | One namul dish |
| Fruit | 4–6 kinds, arranged by placement rule | Count and arrangement unspecified in most reports (a few cite 4 kinds) | 4 kinds, no arranging at all |
| Drink | Full array, often including cheongju | One bottle | One bottle of soju |
What the table doesn’t show is how the decisions get made. My mother-in-law keeps the jeon and the meat stack because that’s what a charye table is supposed to have, full stop — the standard hasn’t changed her definition of “supposed to.” We dropped them because, as far as I can tell, nobody in my generation of the family actually wants to spend a Saturday frying fish cutlets for a ritual that’s over in twenty minutes.
Why Everyone’s Suddenly Talking About the Cost
Money is the part of this story that doesn’t show up in etiquette debates but clearly shows up in people’s decisions. According to Korea Price Information’s annual survey of 35 charye-table items (fieldwork done September 12, 2025), the traditional-market cost of a Chuseok table dropped to ₩299,000 in 2025 — the first time it’s been back under ₩300,000 since 2021, when it was ₩274,500. In between, it reached ₩300,000 in 2022, then sat at ₩309,000 in 2023 and ₩302,500 in 2024. Buying the same 35 items at a discount mart in 2025 cost ₩391,350 — just over ₩92,000 more than the traditional market for identical items.
When I ran our own numbers this week, using discount-mart prices for songpyeon, one mackerel, namul ingredients, fruit, and a bottle of soju, our stripped-down table came to roughly ₩85,000 — a bit over a fifth of the 2025 discount-mart average and well under a third of the traditional-market one. That gap is basically the price of the fried dishes and the extra meat we don’t buy, multiplied by however many relatives are supposed to eat them afterward.
The Placement Rule Nobody Can Actually Source
Here’s the part that surprised me most while I was double-checking all this. Almost every Korean grows up hearing that fruit has to go on the table by strict rule: hongdongbaeksuh (홍동백서, hong-dong-baek-seo, literally “red east, white west,” meaning red fruit goes on the table’s east side and pale fruit on the west) and joyulisi (조율이시, jo-yul-i-si, an order placing jujube, chestnut, pear, and persimmon left to right). I was taught both as if they were centuries old.
Hongdongbaeksuh, at least, isn’t in the old rulebooks. A 2019 YTN fact-check traced that phrase — along with the related eodongyukseo (어동육서, “fish east, meat west”) — through Korea’s major Confucian ritual texts — Juja-garye, Garye-jimnam, Sarye-pyeollam — and found no mention of either rule in any of them. The earliest known appearance is a 1969 Ministry of Culture and Public Information reference booklet, and from there the phrases spread mainly through newspaper etiquette columns, not through actual ritual scholarship. Joyulisi has drawn the same kind of skepticism from other Korean fact-checkers, but through a separate paper trail — it isn’t part of what the YTN piece traced. Either way, the rules most families treat as sacred are, at best, decades-old media conventions dressed up as ancient tradition.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve told my mother-in-law this yet. Some corrections are worth making at a family dinner and some really, really aren’t.
FAQ: Chuseok Table Simplification, Answered
Is skipping the fried dishes (jeon) actually allowed?
Yes — Sungkyunkwan’s 2022 standard explicitly lists jeon as unnecessary, not as an optional extra worth adding back. It was the single most time-consuming category in the traditional spread, which is likely why it was called out by name.
Do most Korean families actually follow the Sungkyunkwan standard now?
Not uniformly. It’s a recommendation from a respected cultural authority, not a legal or religious mandate, so households like my mother-in-law’s still keep the fuller version while households like mine have already trimmed further than the standard even suggests. The 2022 survey shows appetite for simplification is broad, but adoption is uneven and generational.
Where did “red east, white west” actually come from, if not tradition?
The earliest documented source is a 1969 government reference booklet, not any Joseon-era ritual manual. A 2019 YTN fact-check found no trace of the rule in the classical texts Koreans usually cite when defending it.
How much should I budget for a Chuseok table in 2026?
Based on 2025’s traditional-market figure of ₩299,000 for a full 35-item table, and discount-mart pricing running roughly ₩90,000 higher, a household following the nine-item Sungkyunkwan standard rather than the full traditional list should land noticeably below both numbers — our own six-item version came in under ₩90,000 this year.
My mother-in-law will probably still fry the fish cutlets this September, and I’m not the one who gets to decide otherwise. But when my own kid is old enough to ask why our table looks different from grandma’s, at least now I have an actual answer instead of a shrug.
⚠️ Prices and survey figures cited here reflect 2021–2025 data from Korea Price Information and Sungkyunkwan’s public announcements; actual costs will vary by region, market, and the exact items a household chooses to include.