Place the tea cakes on the tea tray with the wrapping paper, you can do it without the paper head. However, it is better to collect the scattered tea leaves afterward.

Insert the tea knife slowly into the tea cake from the side of the tea cake. The edges of the tea cake are actually quite loose, and with a few slight strokes of the knife, the surface will fall off. If you wish to still wrap the cake as you did in the store, then just get a little bit of tea on the edge.

Shake the knife back and forth and slowly apply downward pressure so that the pu'erh tea knife slowly has to be inserted into the tea cake. The thickness of the cake is usually not very thick, so don't use brute force, it's easy to hurt your hand here. Because you don't know if the tea knife will come through the edge of the tea cake and stick into your hand. So make sure to rock it from side to side and insert it slowly. In this way, you can pry open the puerh.

If the knife is thicker, the smaller tea cake will actually open when you poke it in. If it's a thinner knife, you can move it side to side more, like dissecting a cake of tea horizontally into 2 round pieces of puerh (holding the knife, along the tea cake, in a circle). Or take 1 cake and dissect it into 2 cakes. If that's the case, then just break the rest by hand. If not, then you might pry off a small piece like this. It's okay to have little pieces like this, because after all that, the tea cake actually loosens up a bit. After that it's just a matter of repeating the above. Stick your tea knife through the edge break and pry it off.

Now you know how to pry a tea cake apart! But remind you every pry down a piece, try to use your hands to break the tea cake, if you can not have to use a tea knife, but also recommended to use a tea knife layer by layer pry, so that the bottom of the leaf is good.