Tea Horse Road (Chamagudao)

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 18 related

1. Story
2. The Tea Horse Road is the modern name for a network of mule and porter tracks running from the tea districts of Yunnan and Sichuan across the mountains into Tibet, and onward toward Central and South Asia. Its economic logic was an exchange: compressed tea, which Tibetan diets valued highly, traded against the horses that Chinese dynasties needed for cavalry. Tea-for-horse exchange is documented from the Tang period and was institutionalised under the Song, Ming and Qing. Two things are contested: the antiquity claimed for the route, and the label itself — 'Chamagudao' is a late twentieth-century coinage, not a term used by the traders who walked it.
3. Knowledge
4. Yunnan
5. Tea Horse Road (Chamagudao)
6. Connections
7. Tea
8. Yunnan
9. Tea-for-horse exchange between China and Tibet
10. Camellia sinensis
11. Tea Horse Road (Chamagudao)
12. Tea-for-horse exchange between China and Tibet
13. Evidence
14. Phytolith and biomolecular analysis identifies tea in the Han Yangling mausoleum (c. 2nd century BCE) and at Gurgyam, Ngari, western Tibet (c. 2nd–3rd century CE), evidencing early tea consumption and overland movement.
15. The Anglo-Indian opium trade, organised as a Bengal monopoly and sold on to private smugglers, rose from a few thousand chests annually in the 1820s to roughly forty thousand by 1839 and reversed the silver flow that had funded tea purchases.