Pressed tea (bing cha) (餅茶, bǐngchá)
Bing cha (餅茶, bǐngchá) — "tea cake": a pressed disc of tea, the classic form of pu-erh. Pressing compacts the leaf for storage and transport and sets a distinctive, slow course of maturation.
The cake is the most recognizable form of Chinese tea. The pressing tradition is older than it seems: for centuries compressed tea traveled by caravan along the tea-horse roads to Tibet and beyond, because a dense disc survived a journey that loose leaf would not have. The classic pu-erh cake weighs about 357 grams: seven such cakes make up a qizi bing, a "stack of seven sons," convenient for accounting and transport.
Tea is pressed like this: finished mao cha is steamed to make the leaf pliable, poured into a cloth bag, and pressed — traditionally under a heavy stone, industrially by hydraulics. Stone pressing is looser, and such a cake matures faster; machine pressing is denser and releases its leaf more slowly. The form affects maturation in earnest: inside a dense disc the exchange with air proceeds differently than at the edges, so an aged sheng pu-erh from the middle of a cake and from its rim can sound different. Besides cakes, tea is pressed into bricks, tuo cha nests (like the compact Xiao Tuo Cha), and even giant qianliang columns.
The practitioner needs two things: a pu-erh knife and patience. A cake is taken apart by inserting the blade into the edge and separating the layers, not chopping from above — chopped leaf gives a murky, bitter liquor. And don't break up the whole disc at once: tea lives better in an intact cake than in crumbs.
Teas where this appears
Chinese tea glossary