ANCIENT WAY

The vivid colors and patterns typical of robes in Benzilan A centuries-old trading route through China's Yunnan Province unlocks a land of rice paddies and teahouses where tradition persists in the face of modernity's relentless push

- Chris Schalkx

They'd come from there," said Qing Lao, pointing a leathery finger at the snow-cloaked mountains from where the caravans would appear. We were in Niding, a tiny hamlet cradled by the mountains of northern Yunnan, in the southwest of China, drinking yakbutter tea around Lao's kitchen stove. I was coaxing him to dive deeper into his memory.

He recalled shreds of those days in the 1960s and '70s when mule-drawn caravans plying the old trade route were still common, the copper clang of their bells and throaty giddyups of trailing porters echoing through the valley, and how he and his neighbors would jump into action upon the caravans' arrival. They'd relieve mules and porters of their backbreaking loads: black sugar, wooden bowls, and hundreds of pounds of pu-erh, the region's fermented black tea, tightly packed into bricks. They'd tend to blistered skin and frostbitten fingers, feed the animals, and send the men to the 12 village homes to rest up in advance of the monthlong trudge to Lhasa that lay ahead. e all Tibetans, mountain folk," Lao said, pouring me another cup. "We knew the hardships they'd been through."

Niding was one of the last supply stations for caravans traveling west along the Tea Horse Road, a loosely defined tangle of trading routes between several provinces in southern China and Tibet that are over 1,200 years old. The branch in Yunnan winds through rivers and gorges, from the steamy, tea-rich valleys in the south to the barren highlands of the Tibetan Plateau. It was carved out to facilitate the exchange of pu-erh tea-at the time pricier than porcelain and silk-for hardy horses, musk, and medicinal herbs.