When I first arrived in Sichuan, I was told no tea porters were still alive. Today the trail lives on in the memories of men like Luo Yong Fu, a watery-eyed 92-year-old whom I met in the village of Changheba, a ten-day walk for a tea porter west of Yaan. Tibet had something China desperately needed: horses. The desire to trade was why the trail existed, not the romantic swapping of ideas and ethics, culture and creativity associated with the legendary Silk Road to the north. Yet the trail was heavily used for centuries, even though the cultures at either end at times despised each other (and still do). Snowstorms often buried the western part of the trail, and torrential rains ravaged the eastern portion. One of the highest, harshest trails in Asia, it marched up out of China's verdant valleys, traversed the wind-stripped, snow-scoured Tibetan Plateau, forded the freezing Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween Rivers, sliced into the mysterious Nyainqentanglha Mountains, ascended four deadly 17,000-foot passes, and finally dropped into the holy Tibetan city. The ancient passageway once stretched almost 1,400 miles across the chest of Cathay, from Yaan, in the tea-growing region of Sichuan Province, to Lhasa, the almost 12,000-foot-high capital of Tibet. Before the trail is bulldozed or obliterated, I've come to explore what's left of this once famous but now all-but-forgotten route. Recklessly rushing to modernity, China has been paving over its past as fast as possible. In fact, most of the original Tea Horse Road is gone. I'm forced to admit that here at least the Tea Horse Road has vanished. In the morning I probe ahead another 500 yards before an impenetrable wall of jungle stops me, for good. That night I camp high above the creek, but the wood is too wet to make a fire. I'm hoping, at some point, to cross over Maan Shan, a high pass between Yaan and Kangding. ![]() I carry on, entering a narrow passage where the sidewalls are so steep and slippery I have to hang on to trees to keep from falling into the bouldery creek far below. The vestigial cobblestone path lasts only 50 feet, climbs a set of broken stairs, then once again disappears, swept away by years of monsoonal deluges. ![]() Some of the stones are pitted with water-filled divots, left by the metal-spiked crutches used by hundreds of thousands of porters who trod this trail for a millennium. Before me is a four-foot-wide cobblestone trail curving up through the forest, slick with green moss, almost overgrown. Then, with one wide sweep of my ax, the bamboo falls. A few days earlier I met a man who used to carry backbreaking loads of tea along the path he warned me that time, weather, and invasive plants may have wiped out the Tea Horse Road. Just 60 years ago, when much of Asia still moved by foot or hoof, the Tea Horse Road was a thoroughfare of commerce, the main link between China and Tibet. This story appears in the May 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine.ĭeep in the mountains of western Sichuan I'm hacking through a bamboo jungle, trying to find a legendary trail.
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