Apparently it's #NationalTeaDay in the UK. Today I'm drinking one of the best black teas - Qímén ('Keemun', 祁門紅茶) from Anhui province in China.

Anyway, question: Did people in island Southeast Asia drink tea before early modernity?

The tea plant actually comes from northern mainland Southeast Asia and most of the world's words for 'tea' may come from an Austroasiatic language (although the precise origin is still debated - Wiki has a whole article just on the 'etymology of tea') https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_tea

As far as I know, though, there are no references to tea in any medieval Indo-Malaysian texts. The word doesn't appear in the Old Javanese corpus and it only occurs in more recent works in Classical Malay.

There aren't any references to the drinking of tea in the archipelago in foreign accounts, either. In fact some say explicitly that tea wasn't present in medieval Java.

The 15thC Chinese translator Mǎ Huān (馬歡) says, speaking of Java, 'When they receive passing guests, they entertain them, not with tea, but only with areca-nut'
("賓客往來無茶，止有檳榔待之").
(Translation by J. V. G. Mills - 1970)

Instead of tea, people in medieval Indo-Malaysia chewed mildly narcotic quids made up of slices of areca nut (seeds of Areca catechu) wrapped in the leaves of the betel vine (Piper betle), with other ingredients like camphor, clove, and gambier added for flavouring.

This tradition of betel chewing has largely died out in western Indonesia and Malaysia, replaced by tea, coffee, and tobacco, but it's still an essential part of the daily routine in many parts of eastern Indonesia.

It's entirely possible, though, that tea was consumed by local Chinese communities. By the fifteenth century large numbers of people of Chinese ancestry - mostly from the southern port cities of Quanzhou and Guangzhou - had settled in coastal towns in the archipelago.

It's difficult to be sure, but these settlers appear to have brought certain traditions with them, like the playing of card games. A reference in Bujangga Manik suggests that Chinese people were valued for their skills in archery, too.

It would be surprising if they didn't keep up other Chinese traditions like the drinking of tea. We don't have any records of this (as far as I know!), but it is notable that words for tea in island SE Asian languages (e.g. Malay "teh") come from southern Chinese topolects...

It would also be surprising if sailors in ships from China didn't bring tea with them to drink.

So, anyway, it's entirely possible some people in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago in the Middle Ages drank tea. It's just hard to be sure given the nature of the evidence.

Did anyone in the region drink coffee? Probably not. Well, almost certainly not, really. It only seems to appear in the historical record in South Arabia in the fifteenth century and spread out from there in early modernity.

Lucky them for not having it, I say. I could never be a regular coffee drinker. If I have a couple of cups of coffee I don't feel energised and awake; I just feel antsy and pissed off. I don't know about you, but tea keeps me on an even keel.

I realise that on the internet that's a little like saying you hate cats, but I dislike coffee and blame it for many of the world's ills