The most traditional style of brewing Chinese tea, 'Gong Fu Cha,' may seem quite ceremonious. Indeed, tea houses in China will often brew tea in the Gong Fu style with added flourish and showmanship. However, the application of its steps is actually less concerned with ritual but rather focused on proper tea making to ensure a perfect cup of tea.
In Gong Fu Cha, tea leaves are brewed in small, concentrated amounts and re-infused over and over to taste how the tea changes as the infusions progress. This method of tea preparation allows the tea-maker and guests to thoughtfully explore a tea's full range of expression.
'Gong Fu' roughly translates as 'right effort.' In tea, that effort is directed towards practicing the right time and skill necessary to make the best tasting cup of tea for a guest. A sip from a small cup of tea prepared in this manner should ideally encompass the entire breadth of flavor and aroma potential to that tea, accentuating the complexity in its finish. Its process of preparation, in contrast, should go virtually unnoticed by the guest 'an effortless effort. In Gong Fu Cha, there is only tea.
Though Lu Yu's 8th century Cha Ching ('Classic of Tea') contains the first known record of a version of Gong Fu tea, the method as we know it was not truly standardized until the Ming Dynasty (14th-17th centuries), when the consumption of tea in the form of steeped infusions of dried loose leaves first became widespread. With its long history, many styles of Gong Fu Cha exist, some more elaborate than others. However, because Gong Fu is foremost about the taste of the tea, a beginner needs only to know its most basic steps.
