Walking in the footsteps of China’s historic caravans of tea porters – National Geographic
Author and Nationwide Geographic Society Discoverr Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Stroll is a 24,000-mile storytelling odyssey The world over Inside the footsteps of our human forebears. He sends this dispatch from Sichuan Province, in China.
Tianquan County, Sichuan Province, China“I noticed them As quickly as I used to be a youthful boy. They have been On A daily basis bent over.”
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Meet Chen Shou Kang: nice, bald, energetic even in his 80s, the unofficial historian of the village of Wayao Guan, located Inside the lumpy mountains of western China. Chen is remembering the final beifu he ever noticed. Beifu: the legendary tea porters who for 250 yrs shouldered inconceivable burdens of black tea over the japanese Himalaya and into Tibet. Throughout genperiodtions of such commerce, mightbe two million bearers might have inched over China’s perilous tea roads, carrying particular person masses as heavy as A up So far fridge. They did this sporting grass sandals or barefoot, over 11,000-foot elevations, for weeks at a stretch. Typically, they managed Simply a few dozen steps earlier than pausing from exhaustion.
“They have been poor. That they had no completely different selection,” previous Chen explains. “By the Nineteen Fifties they have been changed by vans.”
Village historian Chen Shoukang shows a typical cargo carried by porters—bricks of tea in bamboo-wrapped containers.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
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