Uji supplied powdered green tea to Kyoto's imperial court for over four centuries before the rest of Japan learned its name. The Uji River valley's morning mists and loamy soil produce tencha leaves with chlorophyll density unmatched elsewhere in the archipelago. By the fourteenth century, shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu had designated seven Uji estates as official purveyors, a distinction that survives in the region's family-run tea houses today. The private tea ceremony format emerged during the Momoyama period as daimyō sought instruction away from the scrutiny of rival clans. Sen no Rikyū, who codified the four principles of harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility, operated a small tearoom in Uji before his Kyoto studio attracted the attention of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Modern Uji private tea ceremony sessions preserve that intimate scale, conducted in machiya townhouses or tatami rooms overlooking stone gardens rather than in commercial demonstration halls. The town's position fifteen kilometres south of central Kyoto kept it insulated from the tourism economy until the 1990s. Today, fewer than thirty licensed tea masters offer one-on-one instruction in Uji proper. Sessions emphasize the tactile preparation sequence: warming the chawan bowl, portioning matcha with a chashaku scoop carved from a single bamboo node, and whisking in the prescribed eighty-stroke W-pattern that aerates the powder without overheating it. The ceremony's meditative pace stands in deliberate contrast to the rapid sencha service found in contemporary cafés. Uji's teahouses occupy renovated Edo-period structures along the Ujigawa riverbank. Many preserve clay-walled interiors and sunken hearths that predate the Meiji restoration. The neighbourhood surrounding Byōdō-in Temple contains the highest concentration of family operations, some operating under the same name since the Tokugawa shogunate. Booking a session here means learning from practitioners whose grandparents ground tencha on the same granite millstones still in use today.