Gongfu Tea and Teahouse Culture

Gongfu cha means tea made with effort, and in practice it is a method: a small clay pot or a lidded gaiwan packed heavily with leaf, water just off the boil, a first pour discarded to rinse and wake the leaves, then a run of infusions of a few seconds each, poured into thimble cups and drunk at once. The same leaf carries eight or ten pours and changes with every one. Six broad categories are recognised, from green and white through oolong to dark fermented tea, and the regions are named on every menu: Longjing from the hills by West Lake, rock oolongs off the Wuyi cliffs, aged pu'er from Yunnan. The processing techniques were inscribed by UNESCO in 2022.

What you actually see

• The gaiwan - a lidded cup used as a pot, the lid holding the leaf back as you pour.
• Yixing clay pots - unglazed purple clay, seasoned over years to a single type of tea.
• The short infusions - the same leaf poured eight or ten times, each cup different.
• Teahouse afternoons - covered cups topped up with hot water while card games run for hours.

When to go

Any time of year. Teahouses in Chengdu and Guangzhou fill through the afternoon, while tea markets are morning trade and quiet by mid-afternoon. Spring, from late March into April, is when new green tea reaches the shops and prices are at their highest. A proper tasting takes an hour if you let it.

Honest expectations

Tea shops in visitor districts run a scripted tasting that ends in a hard sell, and prices for wrapped gift tea bear little relation to quality. Aged pu'er is widely faked and impossible for a beginner to judge. Free tastings are never free in intent. A plain teahouse with a thermos of hot water costs a fraction and is more honest.

Nearby

The Longjing tea hills sit above West Lake, and tea markets cluster in Guangzhou and Kunming.