Tag Archives: Ancient Tea Horse Road
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – Tea and Bloodlines
On foot our team of four puttered and wandered west (often faintly lost) through the Nyanqen Tanghla mountains in Tibet towards Lhasa. Highlights seemed on some days to be every single breath and moment. On other days, the grind of … Continue reading
Tea Horse Chronicles – Remnants
Within the tidy remnants of a former ‘Tea and Horse Trade Office’ in Mingshan County, near Ya’an in Sichuan, Jamyan and I wandered for 25 bizarre and wondrous minutes. As we made our way in to the horse dung and … Continue reading
Tea Horse Road Chronicles – Empress of Cloth
Ponzera, or Benzilan as it is now known, is a small valley town in northwestern Yunnan that lies alongside a headwater stream of the Yangtze River. For its size and population, its contributions to the Tea Horse Road spanned vast … Continue reading
Canadian Geographic Interview – A Revisit with the Tea Horse Road
A revisiting of the Tea Horse Road with Canadian Geographic for an interview Continue reading
Puerh’s Ancient Cylinder – 竹面 – Zhú tǒng
The round cylinder of compressed Puerh, was formed using a bamboo husk and provided one of the most effective means of transporting tea along the Tea Horse Road. Continue reading
He Kai Ancient Tree Puerh – A Long Walk
Nothing quite ‘scars’ the palate like a magnificent hit of a powerful tea. From that moment forward something has changed and it might as well be an actual mark or scar because it is memorable and it changes everything for … Continue reading
Puerh – Age and Other Words
Age of trees or bushes is one of the questions particularly vital to any discussion or selection of Puerh (regardless of how you spell it). A ten-year old tea doesn’t tell the drinker anything about the age of the leaves when picked, and for many of us this is a more intriguing and more delicious question than it sometimes gets credit for. Continue reading
The Ancient Tea Horse Road – Now in Portuguese
As an old trader along the Ancient Tea Horse Road once remarked to our team as we traveled through his village, “You all are lucky because you can read, you can write, and can tell a story that many will … Continue reading
Tea Horse Road – words from Drolma
Elder Drolma from Dzogong speaks and reminisces about the days of the Tea Horse Road linking her home in eastern Tibet with Lhasa and beyond. In her words “It was a journey that both gave and took life”. Both Drolma … Continue reading
Tea Horse Road – Nomad Style
Few can claim to live as simply and as absolutely efficiently within (and atop) their environment as the nomads (ndrog’ba) who have long learned to survive and thrive well above 4,000 metres. Closer to the sky than most, their lives … Continue reading