Tea Horse Road (Chamagudao)

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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.