Women were not allowed to take part in the Tea Ceremony, as during one of the rituals, called ‘Introduction to Tea’, tea was to rest on the palm of the hand for some time. Woman, who possessed the Yin nature and were closer to earth, might have lowered the energy and the status of the ceremony. This is why, following the advice of the Tutor, the Head of the Nan Song house, allowing his first wife and his favourite daughter to attend the ceremony, decided not to allow other women into the sacrament of the Tea Ceremony. Having a Tea Ceremony was risky as it was: the presence of heads of other influential clans at the Tea Ceremony could be charged with problems.
It was decided that the women would be offered a healing drink ‘for all seasons’, which would be served in another ‘small’ hall, and from there, later, they would leave for home. The tea was, actually, not just tea. It was a blend of fine components, each of them symbolizing one of the five elements – earth, water, wood, fire, metal – or, correspondingly, the organs of the body – the spleen, the kidneys, the heart, the lungs – or, in another projection, the seasons —Indian summer, winter, spring, summer, autumn. The drink was made from a cherry-like fruit, a flower resembling an aster, a nut, the skin of which when soaked in hot water would produce a most refined flavour, from a little crystal, which in the boiling water would turn into a stinging jelly-fish, and from the tea leaves themselves. The drink was intended to give the guests strength to restore the energy they had spent at night and to endure the long way back home.
The men were offered a three-hour tea ceremony as a shortened morning variant. It was decided to serve only two kinds of tea – the Yunnan peach tea, a blend of fresh moist tender spring leaves, and tea harvested a bit later in the highlands by maiden beauties, who used their delicate thin fingers to roll up the leaves and their saliva to glue them into rolls. The Yunnan peach tea did not have peach leaves at all, but the peach trees that enclosed the secret tea plantation shared with the cultivated tea their special peach flavour, which would bloom only after the second brewing.
The bamboo flutes started, followed by ‘shen’, the wind instruments, the divine harps, the citharas and little ceremonial drums. To soften the atmosphere of the men’s gathering, the female Yu mode had been chosen. The most refined, tender plays of the tunes were suggestive of the coolness of a mountain stream, or of a tranquil movement of water in a valley river. In the context of female absence, it was a hymn to that water, which was delivered from a special spring up in the mountains in the vicinity of the Celestial Masters’ Small Temple.