In his rambling way, he notes that both three steeps and multiple steeps were known at that time, with three being the norm, which suggests that the change might have been a development of the 1990s. Most likely he was paraphrasing Yu Hui Tseng of La Maison des Trois Thés, the only teashop in Paris he seemed to have any regard for.Dominique T. Pasqualini wrote: Number of Infusions
When the leaves are placed in the gaibei, the considerable number of pourings of water that will infuse it will not be decided by the quality of the tea, which is often crude, but rather by the certainty that at the end of the day, the water will have lost all color and savor. During infusion, a good quality white, yellow or green tea will undergo an evolution of the same type as a wine, with its successive primary, secondary and tertiary bouquets. However, when a bottle has been uncorked, another evolution takes place, not in the course of tasting, but in the lost balance of the wine, specifically by way of the acceleration of its exchanges with the air or by the mechanical movement necessary to serve it, which also affects it. Tea follows a similar course, but through various infusions, generally three: in the first one, the most flowery perfumes are diffused, then in the following liquor, the same takes on its greatest fullness, and finally one sees the dominant character impose itself. This course will reveal even greater differences -- more marked or more modulated -- in Taiwanese Wulongs and in the huge blue-green family of Chinese teas, especially the Dan Congs or the "rock" teas, the aromatic complexity of which is sometimes even greater than that of wine. Considering that all the nuances of its most volatile aromas are obtained, the period of infusion is remarkably short, rarely as long as half a minute; so the quantity must also correspond to the amount that one will be able to drink before it goes cold; in that way the infusion brings out only a few of the possible qualities of the measure of tea, which must be diffused in later fillings of the teapot. A Wulong, prepared in the gongfucha manner, will thus allow between six and fifteen infusions taken from the same tea leaves. For some exceptional crops, these limits may even be exceeded... An old Pu Er is probably the tea in which the number of infusions will be taken furthest: one must say that the length of time for which the leaves are soaked is also, on a sort of compensatory principle, much shorter: the time for the measure of tea to be covered. The multiplication of "waters" on a black tea, only lengthening the amount of time that the leaves are soaked very slowly -- by a few seconds at a time -- might indeed carry on for several hours, or even days. If the climate is not too hot and if the tea has more than thirty or even ninety years of maturity.
"Rinsing water," Lu Yu said when speaking of bad teas. The phrase is literal if used to designate brewing as still practiced in the West, even in the most highly-regarded places, because it is indeed the first water that is consumed, the water which in China rehydrates the leaves and rinses off any dust. To confirm this general inversion of things, while one has not thrown away the first (washing) water, the leaves are left for too long in the infusion, annihilating any possible fragrances and spoiling the savors of the liquid, and the leaves are thrown away without being given the chance of another infusion. It is remarkable that the counterfeit version of "British tea" in the nineteenth century, by recycling infused tea, paradoxically achieved what can be extracted from tea with a more precise economy of means.
That might also explain why the author of A Passage to Chinese Tea disagreed, as his experience with Taiwanese tea-culture was from the 80s -- by the 90s he was running his own teashop in Malaysia.
"It was the style at the time", just the same way that a person can make a reasonable guess at how old a photograph is by the style of the haircut, even though there were some people with that haircut before that time, and some people who kept it long after its popularity faded.
