The session.
The session happens in a courtyard, at a wooden table that does this every day: a scale, a steamer, cloth bags and the family's own spring tea. Weigh the leaf — 357 grams, the classical cake, a number with more history than arithmetic in it. Steam it over the pot until it gives. Bag it in cotton, and twist.
The stone.
Then the press: a flat stone — decades old, smooth as a riverbed — set on the bag and leaned into with your weight, turning as you press. The bag's imprint becomes the cake's mould; the family's stone is the family's signature. Ten minutes' cooling, unwrap, and the cake stands on the table, dense and fragrant, stamped with the year and the village. It is the same process the caravan bricks used — the physics that made a four-thousand-metre walk survivable, performed as hospitality.
What it teaches.
Press a cake and the tea market becomes legible: why age matters (the cake you are holding will change, and the family can tell you what to expect), why compression matters, why the fake 'ancient tree' theatrics of the tourist shops collapse the moment you have held real leaf in your hands. The pressing session is the journeys' best hour — part craft lesson, part commerce lesson, entirely delicious.
Keep reading
Tea-horse way stations
Tea with meals
Dai village evenings