China’s Ancient Tea Horse Road (ATHR) looks back onto a long history as a trading network, centred around Yunnan, Sichuan and the Autonomous Region Tibet. While the ATHR in its present form has been established during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in order to trade Chinese Pu’er tea and Tibetan horses for the Chinese military, it’s early roots can be traced back over the emergence of horses as pack animals in that area around 1700 BC, the establishment of early salt trading routes around 4000 BC to earliest human movements in the Neolithium.

 

Comparable in its importance for trading in the area to its more famous cousin the Silk Road, the trading network known as ATHR is a complex network of the main trading routes between Yunnan and Tibet and Sichuan and Tibet as well as smaller routes branching off stretching from Yunnan and Sichuan through Tibet into India as well as into the Southeast Asian countries of Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam and to the Chinese capital Beijing, running through a highly diverse landscape in terms of natural scenery, history and ethnic populations. Until today cultural and economic centres established during its active role as trading route such as Dali, Zhongdian and Lijiang continue to exist and have in several cases turned into tourism hot spots.

 

In a bid to develop the ATHR as a tourism brand, the Chinese government put it forward as UNESCO World Heritage in 2011, seeking to developed the former trading route as a cultural and environmental heritage trail and thus a destination in its own right. The ATHR will, if these plans succeed, become China’s first official long-distance hiking trail. Accordingly the focus lies on nature-based tourism with the added benefit of being able to experience lifestyle and culture of the ethnic minorities alongside the network. However, travelling to and on the ATHR is already happening with small adventure tourism operators offering tours of the ATHR, as well as self-organised hiking groups walking parts of the ATHR short- and long-distance and backpackers flocking to havens such as Dali and Lijiang.