‘You will have a lot of trouble’, in How to Read the Future with Tea Leaves, translated from the Chinese by Mandra 2nd edn.

This slim volume traces the use of tea-leaf divination to 229 BC, when this method was supposedly adopted by a Chinese princess. The pamphlet provides a handy guide to decoding the shapes formed by leaves in the cup. Some of the shapes are remarkably difficult to tell apart, such as numbers 38 and 42 – ‘You will meet a stranger’ and ‘You will make an enemy’. Other predictions are bizarrely specific: number 44 indicates, ‘You will be interested in the Navy’. Shown here: pp. 10–11