The Tea Horse Road (Chamagudao, 茶马古道) was a network of mule and porter paths through the mountains of Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet in south-west China, used to swap Chinese tea for Tibetan horses from the Tang and Song dynasties until the Republic of China (1912–1949). At its fullest it ran on two main arteries: a Yunnan line from the tea country around Pu’er north through Dali, Lijiang and Shangri-La to Lhasa, and a Sichuan line of more than 1,000 km from Ya’an through Kangding to Lhasa, with branches continuing to Nepal, Bhutan and India. Compressed tea bricks, salt and Sichuan silk went up into the plateau; sturdy Tibetan horses came down. It mattered because each side needed the other: Tibetans had come to depend on tea, and Chinese dynasties needed cavalry mounts to fight nomadic armies on their northern frontier. No single archive tells this story. It has to be assembled from tax offices, legends, explorers’ cameras, surviving market towns and the memories of the last muleteers, and each source shows a different part of the road.
Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea and the Song Tea and Horse Offices
The earliest written evidence is not about the road at all but about the product it carried. Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea (Chájīng), written around 760–762 during the Tang dynasty, is the first book devoted entirely to tea. It describes leaves being steamed, pounded in a mortar, pressed into moulds and dried into cakes or bricks, which were later roasted, ground and boiled with a pinch of salt. That pressed form is the key to the Tea Horse Road. Loose leaf would have crumbled on a months-long climb; a dense brick could be stacked, strapped to a frame and carried over passes.
The Classic also discusses where the best leaves were produced, and the road’s two source regions sit high on any such list. Sichuan and Yunnan are believed to be the first tea-growing regions in the world, and records suggest tea was being cultivated on Mount Mengding, between Chengdu and Ya’an, earlier than 65 BC. Ya’an remained a tea-trading hub until the 20th century, which is why the Sichuan artery began there. In Yunnan the old trading town of Pu’er gave its name to the region’s fermented tea. The town was renamed Simao in 1950 and only took the name Pu’er back in 2007, when the surrounding county became Ning’er.
For the trade itself, the strongest documentary source is the Chinese state. Under the Song dynasty (960–1279) the court set up Tea and Horse Offices (茶马司, chamasi) to run the exchange. The reason was military: the dynasty needed large numbers of warhorses against the Liao, the Jin and the Western Xia, and the herds of the Tibetan plateau were the nearest supply. Special tea and horse markets were promoted at Ya’an in Sichuan, Linxia in Gansu and elsewhere on the frontier, beginning a regulated trade that lasted for centuries.
Government records also show tea being used as a lever. When disputes arose, the court threatened to cut off supply and close the offices. Under the Ming and Qing dynasties the state again controlled tea sales and divided them by region, and the most prosperous tea and horse market of that era was Kangding, known in Tibetan as Dartsedo and to Chinese traders as Dajianlu. These official sources are good on quotas, prices and policy. They say almost nothing about the porters and muleteers who did the carrying.
Princess Wencheng and Butter Tea: Tibetan Tradition as a Source
On the Tibetan side, the evidence is partly legend and partly habit. The starting point is a marriage. Princess Wencheng, from a minor branch of the Tang imperial clan, married King Songtsen Gampo of the Tibetan Empire in 641, the first formal contact between the Tang court and Tibet, and she lived there for nearly 40 years. Popular tea lore goes further and credits her with bringing tea itself onto the plateau. The marriage is historical; the idea that she personally introduced tea is a story, and should be read as one.
Firmer is what Tibetan diet tells us. Tea was being drunk in Tibet by the 8th century and was used in religious ceremonies by the 13th, around the time that butter tea, made with yak butter and salt, became popular. Tibetans can drink up to 60 small cups of it a day. A drink consumed in those quantities, from a plant that does not grow on the high plateau, explains the demand that kept caravans moving. The Ming-era discovery of fermented dark tea fits the same picture: it began as an accident caused by the long transport time to Tibet, Tibetans came to prefer its strong taste with butter and milk, and in the early 16th century tea-makers in Anhua county, Hunan, learned to reproduce the fermentation deliberately for that market.
Ernest Wilson’s 1908 Camera and Peter Goullart’s Lijiang
For what the work looked like, the best source is the photograph. The English plant collector Ernest Henry Wilson spent years in western China for the Veitch nursery and later Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, with expeditions in 1907, 1908 and 1910, and he took a camera with him. His 1908 image of tea porters in Sichuan, reproduced at the top of this page, shows men bent under towering stacks of bricks, each leaning on a staff. Those loads are confirmed elsewhere: porters on the road sometimes carried 60–90 kg (132–198 lb), often more than their own body weight, and used metal-tipped staffs both for balance and to prop up the load while they rested, so they never had to lower the bales to the ground.
Wilson published 500 of his photographs in 1912 as Vegetation in Western China and described his travels in A Naturalist in Western China (1913). Earlier European visitors had written about the western end of the Sichuan route too. Kangding, at 2,560 m (8,400 ft) in a valley about 210 km west-south-west of Chengdu, was known in France as “Tatsienlou” through the accounts of the travellers Évariste Huc and Joseph Gabet and later of Alexandra David-Néel and Gabriel Bonvalot. Through them, and through Chinese records, it is known as the town where porters’ brick tea from Chengdu and other centres was traded for Tibetan wool; it was rebuilt after an earthquake of magnitude 7.75 levelled most of it on 1 July 1786, and renamed Kangding in 1904.
The last era of large caravans has a written witness too. Peter Goullart, a Russian-born writer who had fled to China after the revolution, was posted to Lijiang in north-west Yunnan in 1942 by the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. He stayed more than eight years, at a time when the town was an important stop on the trading and supply route between India and China during the Second World War. His book Forgotten Kingdom (1955) records daily life among the Naxi (Nakhi) people and the traffic passing through. He left in 1949 on a chartered plane to Kunming with the botanist Joseph Rock.
Lijiang itself is evidence. Its old town, Dayan, has a history of more than a thousand years as a meeting point on the caravan trail, and its Naxi houses still show a building style learned from Ming-era Han traders from Nanjing. Dayan, with the villages of Baisha and Shuhe, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List on 4 December 1997, about two years after an earthquake forced extensive reconstruction.
Shaxi’s Sideng Square and the Archaeology of Way Stations
Physical remains are the most direct evidence of all, and the road left a lot of them: paved trails, bridges, inns, staging posts, shrines and whole market towns. Probably the most intact is Shaxi, in Jianchuan County roughly halfway between Dali and Lijiang. It began as a tea and horse trading point under the Tang (618–907) and was at its most prosperous under the Ming and Qing (1368–1912). Its Sideng market square was placed on the World Monuments Watch list of 100 most endangered sites in 2001 and has since been restored in a project led by ETH Zurich with the Jianchuan county government.
Smaller sites fill in detail. At Zhenyuan County the ruins of the Guangen Bridge, an early Qing structure 188 m long on stone piers with more than 50 tiled houses along it, record repeated rebuilding after floods in 1727 and fire in 1862; today only four stone piers survive. Bunakuo, a Naxi name meaning “artemisia plain”, was the largest market town on the eastern route near Lijiang. On 5 March 2013 China’s State Council listed Tea Horse Road sites in Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou as national key cultural relics; Yunnan alone counts 86 heritage sites along the road in 21 counties and cities.
Jeff Fuchs and the Muleteers’ Oral History
The final source is spoken. By the late 20th century, with the caravans gone, much of the road’s history lived only in the memories of elderly muleteers. The Canadian writer Jeff Fuchs set out to record them, becoming the first Westerner to travel the entire Yunnan–Tibet route, a journey of about 6,000 km over seven and a half months. His book, The Ancient Tea Horse Road: Travels with the Last of the Himalayan Muleteers (2008), is built on their accounts of routes, loads and passes, and in 2012 he traced a little-known section from Shangri-La to the 4,800 m Sho La pass north of the Kawa Karpo range.
Oral history has limits, since it reaches back only a few generations, but it captures what offices and photographs miss: which passes closed in winter, how caravans were organised and what the trade meant to the families who ran it. The road also survives as an idea in present-day planning. The Sichuan–Tibet Railway, part of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan, is promoted with the Tea Horse Road’s legacy and will link Chengdu to Lhasa through Kangding, a modern version of the old route across the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
Put together, the sources give a consistent picture: Tang texts explain the brick, Song offices explain the horse trade, Tibetan custom explains the demand, Wilson’s camera and Goullart’s book show the people, and Shaxi’s square shows where they stopped for the night. For where the tea itself grows today, see our guide to the world’s tea-growing regions, and for the better-known overland route further north, compare it with the Silk Road.