Ancient China's Deadly Tea Trading Route | Full Documentary | TRACKS

you're going to bug me i might get a mug you it's that gorgeous one and i believe i can run for peace america download valee now so [Music] the way the tee hits you the way it hits the mouth the way it trails that feeling of exhilaration of intricate yes everything's clear [Music] [Applause] the most important process in tea is this part it's called satin it's killing the green so this is killing the humidity [Music] so i thought what the hell is in this to create this alchemy of tremendous clarity high beyond words feeling a social warmth towards people [Music] this gets out some of the moisture and you can see this old rattan stained with tea oil and tea moisture from years of rolling and fragrance is unreal [Music] i had to get into that world whatever that meant so literally 10 years of my life was spent tracking trade routes the remnants of the t-horse road [Music] and the last traders who were trading up until the early 1950s people never really accessed their their storerooms of memories i just thought why the hell isn't this root been documented it's a great story and we risk losing a massive part of history [Music] one of the original teas the bigger leaf species is here in loads tens of kilos and our trash full our team us old tree tea higher values and raised in manatee little towns south of ottawa [Music] i grew up in a slightly hungarian household and what i mean by slightly hungarian means slightly neurotic and maybe not so slightly so food was coming in that nobody had ever eaten so these are just broken up pieces from mushroom-shaped compressed teas that have been broken apart i was taking pheasant sandwiches to a junior high school where everybody played hockey and and listened to motley crew and here i'm showing up with a pheasant sandwich people of discriminating uh taste wouldn't buy that people who love tea would definitely go in for that i'd be in for that so all of this stuff in my dad's kitchen was just coming at me and tea was one of those things fast forward to taiwan and i thought i was going on a date with a nice young taiwanese woman and in fact no what she had introduced as a an introduction to something very taiwanese which i thought was going to be the date ended up being an introduction to something very taiwanese i was welcomed by close to a dozen people who each brought their own teapot their own tea and i quickly realized these were people who were entirely committed to the leaf it's harvest the cultivation the discussion and far from being pretentious this was obsessive interest in tea so that began a whole sort of phase of learning the leaf i have been here before and i wasn't sure it still existed it's great to see these little shops are surviving it's difficult i think because coffee culture is young it's young it's everything new it's it's a little bit exciting and trendy but tea is still where it's at here and i mean this is the home of tea culture but uh to be has to be said there's a lot of crap tea being served as well particularly in the west where people's palates don't know a good tea from a bad tea and it's these people they don't do bad tea big red robe it's a roasted oolong it's like a perfume and this is one of the most expensive teas when it's rare and produced well in the world there are tea auctions held where tea of this kind da hong pao 50 grams can go for tens of thousands of us dollars it's like t porn [Music] crucial crucial point he just made serving coffee is very quick the process is quick you get a coffee you sip it it's gone tea still needs the aspect of time it's still needs that benefit of wonderful time and he doesn't worry so much about the coffee but he does say a lot of young people are drinking coffee but it's a different culture [Music] being much healthier for the body for the health for the so he thinks he has longevity on its side which i like i like optimism even when it's delusional um but these tea shops surely are disappearing [Music] so you go down downtown where people are shopping you're hard-pressed to find tea shops even 10 15 years ago you'd always be offered tea in a traditional chinese home now that's becoming would you like coke would you like a little shot of coffee we've got a coffee maker by the way coffee is eternally available it seems and yet coffee lacks the story there's no tail it's a beam that was introduced it's modern if we talk on this flowing chart of fluid that's that's created from from these leaves if we're looking at a single point of origin the camellia census amica the big leaf varietal can find its home in the south of yunnan and can can call itself one of the origins of all tea on the planet has to be grown produced cultivated harvested in yunnan province [Music] the best of poer is essentially everything is done by hand with a master at each stage the harvest the cultivation the frying the withering the tea that we know as dry dust and bags that we've grown up in the west with was something made for the addition of milk and sugar we're talking about mass production we're talking about an industry rather than family businesses [Music] here we're talking about tea from bushes and trees that are allowed to kind of go bonkers they're allowed to live unpruned unmolested unfertilized [Music] [Music] so when people think of tea bushes and where the origins of tea they don't often think of a tea forest and this is literally a tea forest a lot of these trees are hundreds of years old this is probably two to three hundred years and what's beautiful about this area is that the t bushes which sort of surround the circumference of this tea forest are the great grandchildren of these original tea trees surrounded by a symphony a chorus of cicadas up here in hokkai mountain standing next to a deity in this part of the world a 750 year old tea tree that produces tea that goes for a few thousand a kilo so this little gem would constitute a perfect pluck and when i say perfect pluck it is literally one bud and one leaf the more value to tea the more likely you're you're going to see just these end leaves and buds sometimes with two leaves and one bud this is where you start to get a lot of the antioxidants the phytochemicals the catechins all of the the essences are going into the end part so when tea is clipped there's no machines up here it's done with a single slice of the fingernail and it is from this one bud and one leaf that one can literally create anything from a white tea to a yellow tea to a green tea to a black tea to a blue or ching or oolong tea the color designation of a tea has nothing to do with what color it appears in a in a cup what it is is it's the process after which this is harvested puerto is the one tea that once it's been fried produced and caked or dried will develop with time and increase with age developing a new chemistry and new medicinal aspects to it it is the one tea that doesn't really have a lifespan it is in continual development all teas that are picked besides pure have between a 4 and 18 month life span before they flatten and become in mandarin what they call dust this is the cradle of all t this is this is mile zero this is the origin of all origins of t right around us it is from here the tea made its way to all points of the compass down into vietnam to lao through burma up into the tibetan plateau tea in japan tea and korea tea in africa right now they can trace its lineage and its dna literally back to these regions in some form [Music] mong hai is the center point of tea for the tea horse road for me this is a little town that became a big city in a matter of the last six seven eight years i've been coming here it's basically a collection point for some of the best pours in the world there's three 400 shops here just selling tea [Music] arguably it is the most t-centric town that that one can find in asia it is 24 7 tea if you see less than 80 or 90 of tea shops on the street you're either in a residential area or you are in a farm zone so it is everything and every t shop owner has their own clients their own relationships uh with both the cultivating peoples and with buyers from the big [Music] [Applause] cities foreign [Music] so uh how you feeling this morning good it's a day to get entirely high on tea there's enough knowledge and enough information and medicinal detailing of tea now it's time to just get ripped there's actually a term in mandarin uh for a tea addict it's called tapping so you've got tea sickness and literally it's this compound it's not one stimulant in tea in a really good unmanipulated tea a fresh tea you have a ball of hundreds of stimulants working together so it's all working together to hit you in the neurological system in the capillary blood flow area it increases your blood circulation while sort of not depressing but relaxing your heart muscle so at the same time you're having all of this multitude of wonderful stimulant effects hitting you and you get a friend whose contributions to my tea education have been nothing less than than than ethnically honey which is one of the the most important of the tea cultivating peoples of southern yunnan and she has a tea shop that's maybe about 80 square feet um and it's basically 24 hours of tea serving of generosity of men and women coming in off the street saying hi sitting down sucking back tea and issuing out these little tidbits of genius indigenous tea knowledge over the years the tea has been amazing it's been plentiful it's been flowing there's been meals and basically this has become like a second home this little tea shop may talks instinctively about tea because she knows it through generations of her family she talks about the people she understands the relationship between the growers and cultivators and the tea bushes and she just understands what a good tea should be [Music] so the methodology of the pouring of tea is important for consistency's sake when you're dealing with high-end teas or pure unadulterated teas and when you're dealing with drinkers and when you're dealing with the tradition of bringing people together for tea you need consistency so first there's an initial rinse the temperature for poo air is fully boiled the first infusion usually but not always is used to cleanse the tea get rid of dust particles eliminate a little bit of the bitterness [Music] may uses anywhere from 10 to 14 grams but infuses it for literally only seconds maybe two three seconds at the most and she continues to pour for potentially 20 infusions [Music] may always stresses three things [Music] know the source where tea comes from [Music] know who makes the tea every village every homestead has a master tea maker or a tea fryer and let your mouth make the decision if you know the basics of what a tea should taste like trust yourself and trust the people you deal with this is one of those really important aspects of tea buying just to meet the growers without knowing the source of a tea you can't determine what quality of tea it is so we're meeting the actual guy who grows the tea who then sells the tea to may who sells the tea to me [Music] you cannot separate this idea of ethnicity and the type of tea that they grow they're all growing pure tea slightly different techniques to fry and dry but we're in a honey hot bed which are the mountain people it's important in the in the long view of yunnan province to understand that this part of china as we call china now was only brought into the chinese or the han empire in the 13th century by the mongols this was an entirely minority driven and ruled place you've got 25 minorities every one of them has a tea culture so we're at one of the highest altitude areas that grows puerte we have some of the oldest tea trees around us and that you've got great drainage and you've got superb clay soil that combined with the fact that you don't get direct rains or direct sunlight you've got the perfect ingredients to make a a tea i would compare it to wine culture because you talk about the soil you talk about the producer you don't just speak about the peach apricot flavored hues this is a far deeper discussion this is a an intricate assessment of each stage of preparation consummation and appreciation and now their tea trees are getting higher amounts of money uh they have clients from beijing and shanghai coming here buying bulk tea may this spring bought 112 kilos of his spring tea that's his almost 60 of his entire stock [Music] we're in the departure point for tea this is the confluence of where the dried tea leaves come they're collected the rolled steamed dried and sent out to all points this is where all the action happens [Music] in the 1990s the region of puerto that we're in in southern yunnan this area could not export distribute its tea beyond officials beyond certain parts of yunnan the indigenous here had great raw materials the traditions stayed intact the raw materials stayed intact so in the 1990s you had two kinds of tea you had utter crap and you had stunners we're within a factory now that produces stunners [Music] it's interesting a lot of people within china don't actually know what a good quality tea is they drink tea it's a tradition but it's not thought about in sort of well we get it down from the store and i mean tea is not something so elite for a lot of regular people in china this is still something that's treated like you know water it's something they drink every day now you're getting coffee sort of moving into a lot of regions which is actually not bad because a lot of the people who aren't serious tea growers are just flipping to coffee which leaves better tea available [Music] coffee is being grown and the irony is the best soils and the best labor is available in yunnan province [Music] i would say the tea culture being of something very traditional and ancient is ebbing [Music] it was an expedition in the early 2000s which led me to shangri-la in those mountains and specifically the tea horse road [Music] the journey that t took i would i would argue that is probably one of the most uh physically daunting journeys that the world's known [Applause] the silk road is known for me the teahorse road is more important more culturally significant [Music] seemed like a natural extension of two obsessions that i've had since i was a boy mountains and tea [Music] in the west we have no idea about this route [Music] silk road touched europe so it plays a bit of a role in european history this is entirely himalayan [Music] this is northwest union and province but more importantly before the delineations of borders this was an old tibetan stronghold called gelton the royal grasslands and 10 years of my life were spent pretty much fixed in this location tracking trade routes the remnants of the t-horse road this is one of the alleys that historically was part of the original t-horse road so caravans would have come through here bearing gifts bearing salt tea gems aprons from tibet they would have been either on their way north west and west to tibet or south to lijiang this is monastery one of the one of the great epic monasteries of the tibetan world it's very important to realize that the monasteries and the spirit world were linked absolutely to economics and trained teas that were contributed to the monasteries would be hoarded the monasteries would wait until the value of the tea went up and then traded off so monasteries actually made profits based on tea galton was also a feeding point a collector sort of a collection point for traders novice monks migrants pilgrims thieves to sort of come together form these massive caravans and make their way off onto the tibetan plateau of lhasa so the ancient tea trees of southern yunnan the traders would bring him up to trading towns like pooh air like dali in turn they would be changed put on to mules high altitude mules if you will and brought up here and then it would go through a series another series of runners or it would sort of be exchanged to put on to yet another mule who was handled by another horseman so the commodity of tea would never really be handled by one sole person for the entire journey or even one mule it would go through a series of exchanges and every time it went through an exchange it gained in value and so by the time it hit the market center points of lay and lhasa and kathmandu the value had accumulated just tremendous value so i decided to document this t-horse road and the first essential part was you assemble a team [Music] and he was the one who's very he's very vital in my life because he was the one that pointed at this wisp of a root one day and said that's where i came from india i said well what the hell is that that's a route to india and he says that's the t-horse road actually when we come from india lassa to here took us two months on the truck you know [Music] born in india he came over the t-horse road with his father to immigrate back to his father's hometown of shangri-la i made an oath promise with old friend dakba that we would travel the route and bring it some of its some of what it was due historically remember the one we went there with the doji condo and all this happened in the big snow yes then one of our millions fall down no yeah because everything was a monotone of white we couldn't see where the ledges were in the hotel fell down ripped open its side and all the luggage was all over the place we almost lost two people um one of my dear friends turned to speak and in a split second was shooting down a glacier had he gone another bit of distance he would have been in a in a gorge pulp finished they were what i like to refer to as languid hardman they were they were people who were mountain savvy they were callous they were bruisers but they were also linguistically savvy and we needed that it's through the tibetan plateau you've got you've got four or five main dialects and you've got dozens of sort of mini dialects [Music] so we needed people who were not only savvy but able to be in the mountains for extended periods of time one of the provisos was they had to drink tea and had to be able to be patient with being lost sonam showed up he was literally a waif i really looked at him and wondered can this guy trek for 52 days hardcore above 4 000 meters lugging 30 kilos of gear well the answer was yes [Music] actually i was growing up in a village yes when i was 10 ages i used to grazing the yaks and cows and horses go up and down up and down 87 of his mass is lungs [Music] now we have only smoked snow now when we attract is the solar is the first time and the snow on this year west chola cannot be it cannot be overstated in all of the interviews preceding our journey shola was always referred to as the two-faced pass it's a four forty eight hundred meter be a month of unimaginable peace and beauty in the spring months and the summer months and uh brutal ferocity in the in the winter months it's um it's a killer it is the first of the major snow passes between gailton shangri-la and lhasa probably the most deadly in that all of the old traders said when you're crossing you have to be aware of winds and you should never rest at the summit praying or thanking the deities for too long you must get off the pass and over because the storms if they the deities that lie within if they see you as taking too many liberties on the summit on the pass they'll strike you down [Music] it's buzzing i get buzzy now because we're about to actually embark on one of the most potent and probably one of the most important small sections of the t-horse road the ascent to shola [Music] it's going to take us about two days of heavy slogging and much is going to depend on the snow if there's a lot of snow at the top it's going to be a hard slog [Music] so we're a few kilometers up from the trailhead halfway to chola halfway being distance wise not time wise we've got a full day's trek ahead before we hit shola and the morning begins as it had does all over this place with tea with sampa with butter with sugar with a bit of silence and a lot of smoke the teas that the locals drink should be looked at as a fuel carbohydrates the addition of electrolytes with salt butter carbohydrates and calories so tea for them and of course for me is is much more than a an afternoon sit down with a bit of a it's more of a a full-on meal oh yeah the ones loosely one's a brick this was very popular and it still is for the tibetans sheerly because of its transportability so tea like this was steamed formed into these shapes and then sent to every point of the compass and the tibetans love it because they can transport it particularly mountain men where they just take a little bit of the tea whittle it off put it into the pots into the kettles and instead of infusing the tea they stew it over time so the teas that they drink have been 20 30 minutes of stewing the addition of butter and salt this is as non-pasteurized as you can get it's non-pc butter but loaded with vitamins then they put it in a bowl sip and at the end what they'll do is they'll actually pour in some barley powder or tampa grind it in to create this actual ball which is often often shoved into a pocket to feed the meals and often just to take a nip of during the day as we as we take in the mountains [Music] we'll see how far the horses can make it but maybe the horses can just remain at base camp while the rest of the team goes to chola [Music] [Applause] what's really exciting about the journey today is there's pilgrims coming in a certain circumambulation because this is the year of the sheep so this is sort of a celebratory year every 12 years for this mountain it was a zigzag of people and mules and hoofs and feet ascending up into the beyond the tree line so to do a waijuan what they call oracora around this mountain range once in your lifetime is considered something sacred and it's utterly physical and this is something about the the the spiritual concept up in the himalayas everything has a bit of a masochistic physical component to it [Music] so we're on an approach to shola which is right over there [Music] on a good day it's it's it's stunning 90 degrees with sun on a bad day you can get blizzards running in here in 10 minutes [Music] and this is literally one of the most important passes not only on the t horse road but this was the gateway to tibet [Music] every time i've been up there and close to a dozen times now it's a different it's a different world it's a different slightly different shade i meet different pilgrims and it's reasserted that how important this pass is and i've got a how should i put this it's like an old relationship you can't shake [Music] so [Music] we've summited shola the pass at 4 800 meters for caravans to reach this point it was a great celebration it was also a celebration because this is the first of the great snow passes traveling from yunnan into and onto the tibetan plateau [Music] it's a pilgrimage route which has become known so you're getting people who know very little you're getting dedicated pilgrims who go once a year uh all convening on the 4 800 meter shoala pass you're getting you're getting guides with boy band hair and running shoes meeting up there leading tremendously under underprepared tourists who want to you know be a part of this journey as much as the himalayas are about a perception of spirituality you cannot take commerce or economics out of the equation [Music] the way to think about it is a super highway of luxury items coming on to some of the remote parts of the planet and when we say luxury we're talking about tea salt resin copper leather uh chama gu dao is the name in mandarin literally tea horse ancient root the tibetans i i feel have a little more accurate description they called it the wide road they also called it the mule road so anything that had value any commodity that had value anywhere along this 5 000 kilometer length would be traded typewriters were coming in the 20th century [Music] that way is tibet permits visas we don't have them nobody gets them to do what we want to do so we're basically paying homage as much a personal respect as we are paying respect to the trade we're paying respect to the mountains and the deities which have allowed us up here [Applause] [Music] [Music] the history of the teahorse road largely is an oral narrative and the last traders who were trading up until the early 1950s people never really accessed their their storerooms of memories and they're still very much alive and well and very vibrant [Music] and a lot of the elders actually started inviting me over for these extended tea breaks which went into whiskey breaks so interviews which began we thought with maybe 30 minutes allotted would end up becoming four day interviews and they weren't just interviews they were living with them waking up with them going on tangents with them getting lost a good portion of seven and a half months was spent getting lost in the mountains [Music] a lot of the the elders knew that the story should be told they often wondered why whitey was doing it that's that's the way it rolls but they were quite proud and quite detailed in their memories of families that were along the route so i took these notes of the maybe 50 or 60 that i've interviewed over the years 80 85 have passed away if there isn't a database of all of these stories then we risk losing a massive part of history his past is called kala kala kala the idea that for 1300 years nothing stopped t trade the priority was to get tribute t's to the tibetans this is not the tibet we think about we risked losing this vital piece of himalayan history that linked three dozen minorities language and it and it linked the ancient commodity the stimulant fuel tea [Music] when we began the journey we had no idea i thought it would take four months it took almost twice that seven and a half months of travel most of which was by foot [Music] and the people along the way emphasized reiterated confirmed corroborated tea was is still the most important commodity that there was [Music] lhasa gets recognized for its spiritual hub it's it's it's holy marks it's holy spots but lhasa was a great market himalayan market town for for centuries [Music] so you had all these runners all these mini caravans uh splicing reforming splicing again striding all over the himalayan plateau and beyond so tea kind of tea literally and figuratively flowed down into the valleys down into these remote corridors and it is the one consistent plant matter you will find in the himalayas in every home tea [Music] so [Music] [Music] and this this route was used by local traders to go up to lhasa act as middlemen act as bartering chiefs for their villages for their towns for their monasteries in the kalikandaki and basically collect what was needed for this this vital swath of nomadic culture and these these villages tucked away in the valleys [Music] the nomads for me represent something vital understated and entirely necessary in this talk of trade and tea i think tea for the nomads means something more than perhaps anyone else on this entire journey through the himalayas because their luxuries are basically all from leagues away [Music] the tent that we entered into was basically a a billowing bit of yak wool with simple essentials for people who move up to six times a year nothing is done in a in a nomadic tent without first starting with tea in the morning and when we asked one of the women in the tent what tea means her answer was quite simple and i think probably closer to t's essence than any other explanation it's everything it's the morning it's the afternoon it's a gift it's a tribute it's a welcome tia the hills the tea that began the journey in southern yunnan could be traveling for six months and even its chemistry changed along the route oh yeah by the time it reached lhasa poor had undergone this transformation it had actually oxidized and composted so to speak oh yeah [Applause] the cups are presented to guests in a very formal way and the ceremony the the welcoming aspect of it is brilliant and something very touching from people who can ill afford to be giving things away in their tent oh his method of communicating with locals um very much a man of the people and very much somebody who could ask a question in a way that an elder tibetan could understand and that a young youngish western whitey could as well [Music] see [Music] these walls we've been looking we've been just you've taken me around this city the walls here are hugely thick why so thick were there bandits what was the what was the reason for the thickness of these walls because this is these are meters thick yeah this was walled you know as a protection from enemies so this is you know this was well protected this has only one door you know which only you know opened in the morning and at night it should be closed [Music] you know like it's it's the city you know the the capital of mustang once mustang was independent and you know when well amepal the first king of muslim declared mustang as an independent kingdom in the 14th century and that's the time you know lamontagne was formed [Music] so this has been a very very important town you know like because all the trade that took place between india and nepal and tibet you know that is passing through you know like muslims but this was the main trade route for you know like salt will and also for tea but then in the recent time what has happened is we've been cut off you know like trade from tibet you know it's dropped uh when you know tibet was taken over by china and therefore trade and commerce you know declined economic conditions of the people declined and monastic orders also you know declined which means you know buddhism declined that's incredible so the first you know like the trade uh was when he was 14 years old and he went as far as lexi which is the nearest town in tibet from mustang lexi i mean these guys are my heroes he remembers the days of tea coming from uh the trade route before this whole cultural revolution where trade routes were still very much fluid and organic things that borders were just thoughts rather than any delineated fence lines has he ever had a cup of coffee now i've taken coffee it's not good for me he says he feels dizzy and he goes with this tibetan tea this is much better i'm used to this he said he remembers the tea quality being superb and what he said was the tea that used to be traded was stronger more flavor smaller amounts would make multiple multiple infusions of their stewed buja or boja tibetan churn tea any any and he was quite irate with this whole uh you know this descent of quality of the tea oh yeah okay so like once your bed is taken over you know like the good things they stopped yeah they didn't understand anything you know so they completely stopped the butter so there was no trade at all mix it up mix it mmm they need to mix the dough they've mixed it with good and bad tea but in the old days they used to have heavier bricks he says now the weight has gone there's more stems in the tea and you get one good infusion out of this serving and then no taste i almost feel we should give the tea cake too yeah sure you think it's okay yeah definitely this was great so during the discussion i decided on the spot that i was going to present them with a tea cake that i would have liked to have kept but in hindsight i needed to this man it was like a badge i wanted to bring him this tea cake from the origins that has traveled with us for over 5000 kilometers oh [Music] people were so much into tea they even just you know like chewed as they were talking sometimes yeah they chewed tea you know like this like he's doing and you know he's saying like like how people drink coffee they were like entity when was the last time you saw tea of this quality yeah it's been about 25 years since he hasn't seen such a good team [Music] so right now we are in the monastery called uh tsarang sheikh dargeling monastery and this is a very very important monastery uh in the entire region of mistan you know because this monastery is believed to be an epicenter for the spread of tibetan buddhism in the late 14th century [Music] so i now introduce royal blood of mustang oh thank you thank you so can you explain to us a little of your who was the king and who are you okay so you know like uh the kingdom of mustang you know it was established uh in the late 14th century by my you know forefathers you know ahmed was the first king of mustang and the present king is the 24th king in the leanest direct descendant of this you know king 24th he's the 24th king of this dynasty so you know like uh i am the of the nephew of the present king of mustang my grandfather you know my mother's father was the early king and then my mother's brother mother's brother you know became the king so the present king is my uncle so i'm his nephew so can we call you on conquer king if you're king no problem jeff call me too long you know this is the uh monastery kitchen so this is where the tea was made actually you know these are the these are the vessels where tea was made and this is you know how the tea is served chuffing this is called chuffing you know uh you know feeding tea to you know like maybe 30 to 40 monks at one time so these are big ones you know which which are very special to this monastery beautiful tea definitely was a part of everybody's life here in mustang you know without tea we cannot survive the first thing that you do in the morning is drink tea you offer the tea to god you know first and then you know like you offer yourself and to your family without tea i think people cannot survive in this region his sister made the that pungent wonderful fuel uh known as boja tibetan churn tea and basically you continue to drink the cup never gets never goes empty and the tea must be consumed while hot and the tea cannot be wasted because once the butter uh within the fluid uh goes to room temperature or gets cool it forms almost a lard not good for the stomach but this this this tea ceremony was extraordinary in its simplicity [Music] carbine is situated at the conference of two rivers so this is you know kali kentucky [Music] so because it's situated on the confluence that's why it's called kakbani you know kaligandaki valley was very very important in early times for trade you know because this was the main trade route between tibet nepal and india so that's why you know mustang flourished because it was the main trading point between these points and that's why you know muslim flourished culturally religiously and also economically they prospered because you know it was located in such a strategic region so tea would be coming down these valleys on caravans salt leather incense this was kind of a trade highway so to speak through the himalayas well yes definitely you know it was the main highway [Music] this valley was like a perfect line drawn from lhasa down to kathmandu so trade traders automobiles in the later years single file carried over the borders um it it was it represents i think one of the most beautifully simplistic trade routes extensions of the t horse road that that one can find i don't think the t horse road has been really given its due as to how much it affected in a positive way relationships between cultures which could never speak to each other it's also made me realize that the t's journey the literal journey is one of the reasons why it is the second most consumed fluid on the planet these were epic journeys to get tea to every single valley in the himalayas [Music] this has been sort of a brilliant bit of education coming down into the kalikandaki valley [Music] into the ancient capital of lomantong and sarong down to kathmandu [Music] i like to think of it as the retirement community [Music] this was not only a spiritual capital but a market a market capital as well uh the traders upon reaching would also do this whole they would get rid of their tea and salt and they would go immediately to do the pilgrimage [Music] this this valley historically for thousands of years has been temperate [Music] can you remember the days when tea and salt and caravans were coming through the valleys and a lot of tibetans simply stayed here after making an epic journey one too many and and retiring here to do the mala pray drink tea relax and maybe think back to the journeys that they made initially he really worked hard even you know carried loads on his back and then later you know he was able to buy yags you know like horses and then he could you know like use these to you know like carry more stuff right so because of that he was able to gain more wealth they would talk in this old language about a journey of two weeks being a journey of three passes two lakes one village on the left and a formidable woman in town number three they would describe journeys this way [Music] we met traders who probably given what they told us traveled 40 50 000 kilometers in their lives by foot ushering this green stimulant across the top of the world i wanted to ask about the trade routes and the dangers along the trade routes how difficult was it to travel the trade routes [Music] my feeling is that the t root hasn't lost any of its luster [Music] it's only become more important to the development of the himalayas the development of the relationship between the mega powers of india jagar to the tibetans and china they mostly people died due to a snowfall you know because of the coldness standing carrying the weight on the hill and there's standing and dying because of the god not by falling off the cliff it's made me very cognizant of how bound these roots dna trade pilgrims this route was everything it was a pipeline it was a it was an absolute essential highway through the sky that the tibetans describe it beautifully when they dis they describe it as being the eternal road [Music] maldonado stupa one of the great epicenters of faith and certainly one of the great collection points for traders in the past it's a wonderful collection of everything mountain [Music] but coffee again the great great enemy from the south um has made its way into the city reminds me a little bit of beijing in the sense that tea houses are getting fewer and fewer [Music] tease emigration out of these little green bastions of china to all points of the compass this is a tale that needs to be told and you know one one tibetan i'll never forget him i was talking to him for hours a little bit of whiskey was passed uh he went on this sort of tirade about the fact that you know a good story needs to be told [Music] and it's a great story

Channel: TRACKS - Travel Documentaries

Views: 28,621

Keywords: Adventure Stories, Chinese Tea, Cultural Exploration, Documentaries Online, Exploration, Global Beverages, Herbal Tea, Nature Documentary, Old World, Organic Tea, Precious Teas, Southwest China Documentary, TRACKS - Travel Documentaries, Tea Appreciation, Tea Customs, Tea Explorer, Tea Farming, Teapots Collection, Unique Stories, World's Most Popular

Id: SXQN5lbDGX0

Length: 73min 41sec (4421 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2022