Six movements.
Eight minutes.

Before any leaf is touched, boiling water is poured through every piece in turn — into the brewing vessel, out through the fairness pitcher, around each cup, and away. Nothing from this pour is kept.

A cold vessel steals heat from the first infusion, and the first infusion sets the tone for everything that follows it. Ceramic that has already been brought up to temperature holds it steady instead of dropping away mid-steep. The pour does two other things at once: it rinses the ware in full view of the guest, which is a courtesy as much as a technique, and the rising steam clears whatever scent the last tea left behind in the pot.

Dry leaf is measured into the warmed vessel — traditionally tipped from a curved bamboo scoop, 茶則, so that it is looked at before it is used — and the lid is closed over it for a moment.

Guests are shown the dry leaf because a great deal of what a tea will do is legible before water reaches it: whether the leaf is whole or broken, tightly rolled or already open, dark from roasting or pale from withering. The pause under the lid is not idle either. Warm ceramic lifts the dry aroma out of the leaf, and raising the lid to smell it is the first real information you get about the cup you are about to drink.

Hot water is poured over the leaf and discarded straight away, without being drunk. It is called 醒茶, waking the tea — or, less accurately, 洗茶, washing it.

The first name is the better one, because this is rehydration rather than cleaning. Leaves that have been compressed, tightly rolled or stored for years are closed up, and closed leaves give unevenly: a little from the outside, nothing from the core. The rinse opens them and warms them, so that the first infusion you actually drink arrives whole instead of thin. It is also the step to leave out. Delicate white and early-picked green have nothing tightly shut to open, and a rinse would simply send the best of them down the drain.

While the tea is steeping or resting, the lid of the gaiwan is lifted and smelled — or, in parts of Fujian and Taiwan, a tall 聞香杯 aroma cup is filled, emptied into the drinking cup, and the empty vessel smelled instead.

This is not a preface to the ritual; it is a large part of what is being tasted. Most of what people call flavour is smell arriving from behind the palate, and Chinese practice makes that explicit by putting the scent on a separate object so it can be attended to on its own, unhurried, before anything is swallowed. It has a second effect its practitioners rarely mention. It costs about thirty seconds, and those thirty seconds are what stop the session becoming a drink.

The infusion is decanted out of the brewing vessel completely — not most of it, all of it — usually through a small strainer into the fairness pitcher, and only then distributed into the cups.

Two problems are solved by one gesture. Leaf sitting in water keeps extracting, so a pot that is not emptied goes bitter on its own while everyone is talking. And the liquor at the bottom of a pot is far stronger than the liquor at the top, so pouring straight into a row of cups hands the first guest something weak and the last guest something harsh. Emptying into a single pitcher and filling every cup from that makes them identical — which is exactly what 公道, fairness, is naming.

Small cups, taken in two or three sips, refilled again and again from the same leaf across a session rather than replaced with a fresh pot.

The cups are small deliberately. A small cup cools quickly enough to drink at once, it concentrates the aroma under the nose, and it breaks the session into many short returns instead of one long draught. Good leaf also changes as it goes: the second and third infusions are usually the fullest, and the later ones give up a sweetness the early ones held back, so what you are drinking is a sequence and not a cup. The last movement asks nothing at all of you, which is the part most people find hardest.