“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 yak-butter 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 giddy-ups of trailing porters echoing through the valley, and how he and his neighbours 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 month-long trudge to Lhasa that lay ahead. Little was expected in return. “We’re all Tibetans, mountain folk,” said Lao, pouring me another cup. “We knew the hardships they’d been through.”
Niding was one of the last supply stations for caravans travelling west along the Tea Horse Road, a loosely defined tangle of trading routes between several provinces in southern China and Tibet that are more than 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.
The last few caravans trickled through in the 1980s, when mechanical transport had begun to take over. These days the road, paved over, lives mostly in the memory. I had come with my Mandarin-speaking wife and our son to find what’s left of those old days – a period when Tibetan tea merchants, not tourists, thronged the streets of Yunnan. In a time when the influence of Beijing can reach even the farthest corners of mainland China, Yunnan – home to almost half of China’s ethnic minorities, including the Naxi, who arrived from northwest China as well as Greater Tibet – is striving to keep its traditional culture alive. It’s a bastion of preservation, even as China pushes to bring in additional tourism dollars. More than 20 years ago, the Chinese government renamed the village of Zhongdian as Shangri-La, after the fictitious Tibetan village in James Hilton’s 1933 utopian novel Lost Horizon, in the hopes of luring travellers. More recently, upscale infrastructure has arrived that seems to seek to honour, rather than exploit, the land and its history. This includes a new circuit from Lux hotels that brings alive stories from what’s left of the Tea Horse Road, running from bustling Lijiang in the south to Benzilan in the north.
After stocking up on bags of sour mulberries and a salty pickled plum at Lijiang’s morning market – a maelstrom of clattering mopeds and vendors hawking mushrooms, tea and medicinal herbs in a dozen different Yunnanese dialects – we drove north. Once the city’s suburban sprawl thinned out, the road snaked through pine forests and wide valleys where rice terraces seemed to ooze down the slopes like molten lava. Yulong Snow Mountain’s peak occasionally appeared over the craggy hills. As the altitude increased with every turn, the packets of sunflower seeds we’d brought to snack on slowly began to inflate.
The road tapered to an end at Baoshan Shitoucheng (Stone Town), a Jenga-like stack of houses designed in the Naxi style, with airy courtyards and tiled roofs that tumbled downward toward the upper stretches of the Yangtze. We strapped our luggage onto a mule and continued on foot, down a jumble of steps polished smooth over centuries. The village’s remoteness means it’s been overlooked in the drive towards modernisation, and seemingly little had changed since these stones were laid during the Tang Dynasty some 1,300 years ago. Piglets scurried around crumbling courtyards, and vats of sorghum bubbled on wood-fired stoves, ready to be distilled into throat-scorching baijiu, a local liquor. Electricity arrived only in the early 2000s. The village folk, their faces weathered by time and hard work, seemed to have been sitting here for ages, chain-smoking and playing cards under the trees.
Xiuyun Zhang, the sprightly caretaker of Lux’s Tea Horse Road Stone Town outpost, welcomed us with tea and crab apple lemonade. With just six rooms, the Stone Town lodge feels more like a homestay than a retreat. Zhang is well into her 50s but one of the younger locals in this time warp of a town. Courtyards stood empty, their gates locked by a generation that left to chase big city dreams and bigger paycheques. The last of Stone Town’s schools closed a decade ago. As in much of rural China, children are sent off to faraway boarding schools.
When she’s not managing the hotel, Zhang works as a botanist at her farm across the valley. Her expertise in heirloom seed varieties has taken her to conferences in Mexico, Italy and Peru. Three rare types of corn bear her name. I asked, would she ever want to follow the money and move to the city? “My father always told me it doesn’t matter where you go, as long as you work hard,” she said. “When you plant a seed and care for it, it’ll grow. Even if it’s in an empty place.” The next morning we traced the Yangtze downstream, passing more fir forests and rice fields until we reached the village of Daju, near a river bend where the tea horses used to cross. Tiny stone cats, believed in Naxi folklore to ward off evil, sat atop the upturned roofs of the buildings. Inside one of them, a dongba – a wise man of the Naxi – named Guowei received us with loquats from his garden, which we ate gratefully.
Scrolls and sheer sheets of paper lay scattered on the table. Dancing across them were inky dongba characters: an ancient Naxi script predating written Chinese and one of the world’s last pictographic writing systems still in use. It takes a student at least 10 years to master, the dongba told me, and even though the local government promotes its preservation (look closely above the entrance of Lijiang’s Starbucks to find dongba glyphs spelling out the brand’s name in homonym), its legacy rests largely in the ageing hands of masters. Given the layer of dust he had to wipe off the tools he showed us, it seemed likely that his classroom had seen busier days. When I asked how many students he still taught, he laughed. “A lot, but they rarely show up.”
Halfway through our drive to Shangri-La, the style of the villages changed abruptly, from low-slung Naxi dwellings to Tibetan farmhouses with rammed-earth walls and ornate window frames that rose from fields of barley and tobacco. Bone-white chortens, or shrines, lit up the distant hilltops. Signs on identical shopfronts bore spidery Tibetan script.
Ethnic Tibetans make up 80 per cent of Shangri-La’s population, but on the cobblestone lanes of Dukezong, the city’s temple-studded historical quarter, it’s the Han Chinese who stroll around in Tibetan garb. These days digital clout, not tea, is Shangri-La’s main commodity, and costume rental shops run a brisk trade in fur-trimmed chuba robes and bejewelled headwear. At the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery, a layer cake of whitewashed walls and gilded roofs, I asked the abbot what he thought of the state-owned ticket booth outside the gate and the rabbles of cosplaying day trippers using the largest Tibetan monastery in Yunnan as a photo backdrop. He just smiled and shrugged.
I preferred Benzilan, the town that comes just before Yunnan tips into present-day Tibet. Even though thick-set Mandarin characters on every wall extolled the virtues of the Chinese Dream, Xi Jinping’s campaign to rejuvenate Chinese nationalism, the town had a frontier feel, as if Beijing’s hawk-eyed gaze hadn’t yet crept over the moonscape mountains. (Still, cameras watch from every corner.) It was here that we met Lao in Niding, after we followed a road zigzagging up the mountains, past prayer wheels spinning into a rainbow blur.
One morning in the mountains of Benzilan, Tashi, a guide with a floppy mop of ink-black hair, took us up a cliff to the incense-perfumed Ganden Dongzhulin Monastery. Unlike at Ganden Sumtseling, we shared this riot of gold and silk, and a hundred gods peering down from Thangka-painted walls, with only a handful of others: burgundy-robed monks in flashy trainers and Tibetan pilgrims with prayer beads. On the way back we stopped at a dusty shop for bags of milk and jars of baijiu rice liquor (in odd quantities, since even numbers are bad luck), which, for good fortune, we emptied over the head of a marble Buddha.
Our journey ended where it had begun, in Lijiang, where I met Rongui Gu in a timber-framed teahouse crammed with pu-erh discs and lace-fine mahogany carvings. As the last tea trader in an 18-generation-long line, he had crossed the Himalayas seven times. On a map scribbled on tree bark paper, he showed me the route from Lijiang to Lhasa, then south to Kolkata. He had to ward off tigers and bandits, and his hands still bore scars from the ridges he’d climb to forage herbs. These days he’s determined to carry the Tea Horse Road story onward with a museum above his shop. He pointed out the Old Town’s Unesco status and the costumed tourists moseying through. “All this wouldn’t be here without the traders’ perseverance,” he said. “It’s my responsibility to pass on the spirit of the caravan. It’s not just a route, but a way of life. If nobody does, its history will fade.”
Yunnan essentials
Stay
Lux’s Tea Horse Road circuit offers three-to nine-night stays on the old trade route. Travellers can sleep in up to eight lodges along the way, including Lux Sangushui, which has 15 -light-flooded rooms overlooking the Yangtze and a restaurant in a century-old courtyard. Lux Shangri-La looks over gilded temples. At Lux Lijiang, guests are in the heart of the Old Town, immersed in Naxi culture. Excursions include tea ceremonies with Tibetan priests and hikes through the countryside. Each of Lux’s eight properties can be booked independently. Circuit stays from about £475 per night; luxresorts.com
Eat
Tongxinfu Tea House in Lijiang is crammed with tea tablets from southern China. At the homely Shanxun Yunxiang in Baisha village there’s a beautifully plated local, seasonal tasting menu. In a meadow near Shangri-La, the new Pioneer Book Store, which has its own café, breathes fresh life into several traditional Tibetan dwellings. Its 15,000-strong collection focuses on literature from Yunnan, and it also sells enamel pins and figurines. Close by, Ferme Liotard offers French Yunnanese fusion dishes and a Cabernet Sauvignon aged in terracotta jars. The Flying Tigers Cafe in a quiet corner of Shangri-La’s Old Town has an East-meets-West menu of blue cheese yak burgers, -dumplings and craft beers.
