Taking the Tea Horse Road, where there is no turning back

Tag : High Mountain Tea

At the last minute, writes author Jeff Fuchs in his history andtravelogue of the region, a few hundred leaves were added, a cargothat would "eventually overshadow all economic, political andmarital negotiations for a thousand years."
Those leaves were tea, and after an arduous journey of almost 4,000kilometres, Princess Wengcheng and her cargo of gifts arrived inLhasa. Tea took the country by storm. At first, it was reserved forthe nobility, but soon its use spread to the common people andbecame a staple of Tibetan life. Tea became an essential part ofthe tributes the Chinese court bestowed on neighbours and allies.It became an invaluable political tool.
But getting the tea to Tibet, and extending the trade to Nepal, onTibet's western border, and then to India, was a tricky anddangerous job.
For more than 1,000 years, until the 1960s, when modern roads werefinally constructed between western China and Tibet, carrying cargowas the job of muleteers, known as lados, Sino-Tibetan for ironhands, who embarked on a 4,000-kilometre journey crossing threemighty rivers, the Mekong, Salween and Yangtze, across two of theworld's highest plateaus and over and around 78 mountain peaks ofmore than 3,000 metres.
The Chinese, meanwhile, had discovered the Tibetan horse, a stocky,hardy breed to be, well suited to the empire's cavalry forces. Thusa two-way caravan route was set up, known prosaically as the TeaHorse Road.
That's the journey author Fuchs undertakes over a gruellingseven-month period with the last of the lados, their trade finallysupplanted by the more modern, but far less romantic job of drivinga truck.
"There are no straight lines through the mountains," Fuchs, an avidoutdoorsman and accomplished photographer, is told by a Tibetanlado. He learns this fact during his arduous and often dangeroustrek through waist-high snow over remote mountain passes, with nohope of rescue should catastrophe ensue.
The mountains have "beautifully straightforward law," Fuchs learns:"Co-operate or perish."
So Fuchs, a Canadian who has spent the last five years in Asia,enlists the aid of the lados as he sets off from eastern Tibet, theregion known to Westerners as Shangri-La, over the mountains to theTibetan capital of Lhasa.
Refreshingly, Fuchs plays down the danger of his journey, althoughthere is a compelling account of a slog over the Sho La pass in theteeth of a raging blizzard. Once committed to traversing the pass,there is no turning back, Fuchs is told.