Young Chinese tourists, dressed in traditional costumes and adorned with colorful jewelry, stroll down cobblestone alleys. Photographers follow behind them with tripods and flashes; for just 25 euros, these tourists can have a set of photos taken on picturesque stone bridges. Posing in dreamy scenes overlooking romantic rivers, these pictures are sure to garner hundreds of likes on Chinese social networks.
This scene takes place in the ancient city of Lijiang, Yunnan. Located at an altitude of over 2,400 meters, this is a true “Chinese Venice,” with gray-tiled roofs hidden among forests, traditional architecture arranged like a maze, canals, and 354 bridges. The ancient city of Lijiang was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997.
Yunnan Province, close to Tibet and the Himalayas, boasts not only enchanting landscapes but also half of China's ethnic minorities, comprising one-third of the province's total population. These include the Naxi, Tibetan, Bouyei, Yi, and others, each with their own way of life, customs, and distinctive clothing. Through the development of “folkloric” Tourism in Yunnan, these cultural traditions are being preserved. Naxi-style houses, which date back to the Qing Dynasty, typically feature square courtyards and wooden balconies with carvings, and have now been commercialized.
For centuries, Lijiang has been a crossroads where the Silk Road and the Tea Horse Road intersected, fostering thriving trade. Many ancient tea houses still exist in Lijiang today, where one can taste flavors prepared according to ancient methods. In southern Yunnan, with its tropical climate, wild tea trees that are thousands of years old still grow. Fresh leaves picked from the oldest tea tree in Yunnan can sell for several thousand euros per kilogram. Once harvested, the leaves naturally oxidize over time and are then blended with other crops and compressed into cakes weighing 357 grams.
Puer tea cakes, which can be preserved for decades, increase in value over time, much like fine wine or gold. This unique tea in the world flourished during the Tang Dynasty (7th century) thanks to the ancient “Tea Horse Road.”
Along this ancient route, caravans of horses would travel thousands of kilometers from Yunnan through Tibet to India, a journey lasting up to eight to ten months and fraught with danger. Valuable tea was traded for Tibetan horses, furs, salt, and Chinese medicinal herbs. By the 1990s, rapid developments in transportation had rendered horse caravans obsolete, and today, the journey from Lijiang to Shangri-La in northern Yunnan takes only four hours. (By Laurence Augeraud-Vernay, translated by Dong Ming)
Original Title: On the Millennia-Old Tea Horse Road in Yunnan, China
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