The phrase translates as "tea with skill" or "tea with effort," and the second reading is the honest one. The point is not to brew good tea — that is incidental. The point is to make a small, repeatable problem of brewing it, so that you have something to attend to.
What it actually is
A small clay or porcelain pot. A small fairness pitcher. Cups the size of a shot glass. Leaves at a ratio you would call extravagant in any Western tradition — roughly one part dry leaf to ten parts water, sometimes denser. Water just off the boil. Steeps measured in seconds, not minutes.
You pour the first wash and discard it. Then you brew, decant, drink. Then you brew again, slightly longer. Then again. A good oolong will give you eight or ten infusions, and the curve of how it changes — vegetal then floral then mineral then sweet — is the thing you are watching.
Why people fall in
Because the loop is fast. Western tea is one shot at five minutes; you commit to the brew and live with the result. Gongfu is a tight feedback loop: ten seconds, taste, adjust, ten seconds, taste, adjust. You learn the leaf in the same hour you meet it.
And because the equipment forces you to slow down without asking you to. You cannot rush a 30 ml pot. You cannot drink a 30 ml cup absentmindedly. The ritual is structural, not theatrical.
What surprised me
That seasoning a Yixing pot is real and not folklore — the unglazed purple clay absorbs trace polyphenols over years, and a pot you have used only for one tea will, eventually, brew that tea more vividly than any other vessel. Single-pot, single-tea is the convention precisely because the pot remembers. (See also yixing clay.)
That the cha hai — the fairness pitcher — exists not for ceremony but for arithmetic. If you decant ten cups directly from the pot, the last cup is twice as strong as the first; the leaves keep brewing while you pour. Pour into the pitcher first, mix, then distribute, and every guest gets the same cup.
That "fast" tea is, on the clock, slower. A Western mug is two minutes. Gongfu, properly run, is forty minutes around the same leaf and an hour with company.