A Hormuz route takes shape. The bigger number came from Beijing.

For two days Tehran denied that the Hormuz talks had anything to do with Washington. On Wednesday it announced the map. Iran's Foreign Ministry says the coordinates of a proposed shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz have been agreed with Oman, with a joint statement in final drafting. The limits are real. Nothing is signed, Muscat has not confirmed it, the route would be temporary, and Tehran ties everything to a US naval blockade it wants lifted. Still: a government that was denying the shape of the process is now describing its geography.

Oil barely responded. The front month settled flat after three losing sessions and bounced modestly Thursday morning. A price that barely moves when its apparent premise receives its first hard diplomatic output suggests that premise was already substantially priced. The quieter reason sits on the demand side, and it is Thursday's real story: a realized full-month reading of China's seaborne crude imports has crossed the 7.0 million-barrel-a-day level trigger we registered weeks ago for testing the demand-erosion thesis, off a June base now revised to decade lows. The world's biggest oil importer is taking dramatically fewer seaborne barrels, and that is why tankers can burn near a chokepoint while crude sits near its lows.

One caveat carries the day, and we state it once: the import collapse fired our level trigger, and a level cannot settle a mechanism. Beijing cutting purchases while draining a vast stockpile looks identical in this data to demand genuinely rolling over. What separates the two readings, and the schedule on which we expect an answer, is below the wall.

For paying subscribers below: the full regime dashboard, data, and mapped sources. Inside: the China import print and the three readings it cannot separate; the re-rating test oil just failed; our metals question, closed at its deadline against our own prior claim; and Japan, where we correct one of our own reads.