When Shangri-La to Lhasa and back took 6 months: muleteers recall Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan Trail
Men who used to drive mule trains loaded with tea from Yunnan to Lhasa recall the six-month journey and its hazards - a section of which modern-day travellers can now retrace on a guided tour, writes Paul Mooney
Sitting on a colourful rug close to the fire as a light snow falls outside, 80-year-old Denyoun Tsering is warming to his topic. Stopping occasionally to take a sip of rich yak butter tea from an elegant silver-trimmed wooden bowl, he enthralls his small audience with tales of bandit encounters, bitter storms, landslides, exhausting mountain passes and other dangers along the route known variously as the Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan Trail, the Southern Silk Road and the Eternal Road.
'What I'm telling you sounds like a story but it was very hard work,' says the former muleteer, whose bushy black eyebrows contrast starkly with his white beard. 'It's hard to express how difficult it was.'
Tsering plied the route between his home town of Zhongdian, in northwest Yunnan province, now known as Shangri-La, and the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The round-trip trek took six months. Each time he crossed the Yangtze River he had to put his horses and mules on a raft and pull it across the water using a rope tied to the banks. When he reached the Lancang (Mekong), the animals had to be put in slings and carried across the river by a steel cable.
THE TEA TRAIL DATES back some 1,300 years. The Yunnan stretch runs from subtropical Xishuangbanna, at the southern tip of the pro- vince, where people were drinking tea 3,000 years ago, to the caravan towns further north and on to Zhongdian, which is surrounded by snowcapped mountains. The full 5,000-kilometre route, which runs into India and Nepal, was broken down into legs, each covered by a different merchant, known as a muleteer, who travelled with horses or mules, whichever was best suited to the terrain.
Travel company WildChina - in co-operation with Jeff Fuchs, author of The Ancient Tea Horse Road: Travels with the Last of the Himalayan Muleteers - is taking tea tourists in the muleteers' footsteps. The journey to Zhongdian from Jinghong, capital of the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, takes a week by air, bus and on foot. Not so long ago, it could have taken up to two months.
Jinghong is the traditional starting point. It is home to the Dai, Bulang and Wa tribes, all of whom were tea farmers, although it was the local Hani who perfected harvesting and production.