Yaan, city of tea and pandas and historic gateway to Tibet and beyond
Yaan, which bore the brunt of Saturday's quake, has for more than 2,000 years been associated with rare tea, fine horses and elusive pandas
The quake-hit city of Yaan, nestled among mountains on the fringes of the Sichuan Basis, has a long association with the tea trade and even produced the world's most expensive variety of the commodity last year.
The city, located 140 kilometres southwest of the provincial capital Chengdu is surrounded by peaks and has four rivers flowing through the town. It is located almost halfway along National Highway G318 that stretches 5,476 kilometres from Shanghai, through Lhasa and to the border of Nepal.
While the highway is new, it follows a route forged more than 2,000 years ago. Yaan marks the starting point of the Sichuan to Tibet leg of the ancient Tea Horse Road, a network of mule-caravan paths, along which tea from as far away as Yunnan was carried to Nepal and beyond, in exchange for horses.
In ancient times, a horse traded for about 50kg of tea, but as demand and quality improved during the Song dynasty (960-1,279 AD), a horse could be bought for just 20kg of tea.
Yaan is also a synonymous with pandas, and first appeared in historical records as the place where this elusive outlying member of the bear family was first sighted, in Baoxing county.