What the road was
The Tea Horse Road was a trade network, and not a single road.
It ran from the tea hills of Yunnan and Sichuan up to the Tibetan plateau.
Tea went north, horses came south, and that exchange gave it its name.
It was never paved, and it was never one path.
Caravans took whichever corridor was passable that season.
The name itself is modern, and it is a little romantic.
Nobody at the time called it the Tea Horse Road.
What existed was a set of customary routes and a trade that ran for more than 1,000 years.
The trade is well documented, and it continued through several dynasties.
It was at its busiest under the Tang and Song.
It did not stop when the dynasties changed, and that is the part usually skipped.
The state took an interest early, since horses were a military matter.
Tea was the one thing the plateau could not grow and would not do without.
That dependence is why the trade survived wars and border changes.
It also explains why compressed tea exists at all.
Loose leaf does not travel a thousand kilometres on a mule.
The routes
Two corridors carried most of the traffic, and a third extended it.
The Yunnan route started in the tea hills around Pu’er and Simao.
It ran north through Dali and Lijiang and then climbed towards Lhasa.
That corridor ran close to 2,000 km before it reached the plateau.
The Sichuan route began at Ya’an, west of Chengdu.
It passed through Kangding, which became the great border market.
From there it crossed into Tibet and met the other corridor.
A southern extension ran from Yunnan into Burma and on towards India.
Both main corridors crossed high passes and deep river gorges.
The Mekong, the Salween and the Yangtze all had to be crossed.
Bridges were few, and crossings were often by rope or coracle.
A caravan moved slowly, and weather closed the passes for months at a time.
That seasonality shaped everything about how the tea was packed.
Most caravans were small, run by a family or by a village.
The large state-run trains of the Tang were the exception, not the rule.
What moved along it
Tea went north, and it was almost always compressed.
Bricks and cakes travelled better than leaf, and they were easier to tax.
A mule carried roughly 60 kg, and a porter carried less than that.
Compressed tea also survived rain, which loose leaf did not.
Salt, cloth, grain and iron went north as well.
Horses came south, and they were the reason the state cared at all.
Tibet also sent wool, musk, medicinal materials and hides.
Silver moved in both directions, and so did people.
The men on the road were rarely the owners of what they carried.
Most were hired per trip, and the work was hard and dangerous.
Porters carried loads on their backs over passes above 4,000 metres.
Tea bricks were used as currency along parts of the route.
That practice lasted into the twentieth century in some places.
The exchange was as much cultural as it was commercial.
Language, religion and recipes moved along the same paths.
What is left of it
Very little of the road is walkable today, and that is worth saying plainly.
Most of the route now lies under a highway or has been abandoned.
A few sections survive, and they are signposted as heritage.
Ya’an still has a tea market, and Kangding is a city now.
Lijiang and Dali are tourist towns, and the old streets are largely rebuilt.
What survives best is the tea rather than the road.
Compressed tea for the Tibetan market is still made and still in demand.
The shapes and recipes descend directly from the ones carried north.
The romantic version of the road is largely a modern invention.
It is marketed as an ancient pilgrimage route, which it never was.
It was a commercial corridor, hard and unglamorous.
That is a different history rather than a lesser one.
Anyone walking part of it should expect a road, not a trail.
Museums in Ya’an, Pu’er and Lijiang cover it honestly.
They are also the only places that explain it without a sales pitch attached.
Start there before believing anything printed on a tea wrapper.