China's Ancient Tea Horse Road

The antique Silk Road that connected the Chinese and Mediterranean Worlds for more than a millennium, facilitating the exchange of both goods and cultures, is widely known and celebrated.

Less familiar is its more southerly equivalent, the ‘Ancient Tea-Horse Road’ that once linked the lush tea gardens of southwest China with the frigid wastelands of Tibet and – beyond – the torrid plains of northern India. The latter is also sometimes called the ‘Southern Silk Road’, though this is a misnomer, as silk seems never to have played a very important part in the traffic that traveled along it.

Follow the jingling mule trains carrying tea across the centuries from China to Tibet.

35 historic images, 10 contemporary images, 1 map