Editor's Note: Border Tea Trade, a commercial activity whereby the dynastic states in the central plains traded tea with nomadic ethnic groups in Northern grassland and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for horses and other commodities, can date back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279). It runs through every stage of Chinese history. In the thousand-year-long history of Border Tea Trade, all ethnic groups are proactively involved, in the production, processing, shipment and sales of Border Tea.

Tea spreading all over China

Border Tea, as the name implies, was sold primarily to the ethnic groups on the border of the dynastic states in China's history, for example, ethnic groups in Northern China, Northwestern China, and on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. There is no definite answer as to when Chinese people began their tea-drinking habit. Tea residue found in the grain remains of the Western Han Dynasty (202 BC – 8 AD) in Shaanxi Province, is the earliest physical tea found in archaeology to date. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589), drinking tea ("mingyin" in Chinese pinyin) became common among the Han people in southern areas as the then Shu Kingdom (today's Sichuan Province). Tea was roughly decocted with rice porridge, orange peel and ginger. Tea drinking became an art in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), with tea processing-and-making techniques starting to become sophisticated. Tea's plunging into scale production and becoming a commodity in the Tang Dynasty showcased that it had gained in popularity then and possessed a big consumption group. Tea varied in shape from big leaf, slice, pancake to powder, and bar in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) ever since it was simmered and sipped.

The tea-drinking history of northern nomads was relatively late. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, buttermilk, a processed dairy product, remained the dominant drink. Temple Records in Luoyang, written in the Northern Wei Dynasty, described people preferring "mingyin" then were chiefly the Han people of the Southern Dynasty. During Wei Emperor Xiaowen's reign (467-499), the Han people and the Xianbei people learned from and adapted to each other's culture and customs.

The Tang Dynasty witnessed the records of tea trade between the northern ethnic groups and the people in the central plains. In the 8th century, the Uyghur Khaganate, emerging in the Orkhon River, lived peacefully with Tang and even sent troops twice to help Tang emperor put down the An Lushan Rebellion. Trades were frequent between the Uyghur Khaganate and Tang, mainly with horses exchanged for silk, sometimes, also for tea.

It was not until the Song Dynasty that tea drinking gained prevalence among the northern ethnic groups, and the tea-horse-trade became an important form of goods exchange between the agricultural and nomadic people at that time. In addition to the well-known tea-horse trade between the Song Dynasty and Tubo (an ancient kingdom on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau from year 618 to year 842) in the northwest, other dynasties, such as Liao and Jin in the north (Liao and Jin were local regimes contemporary to the Song Dynasty), also exchanged tea with Song.

Archaeological materials provide us with a bulk of physical evidence showing what tea drinking was like in Liao and Jin. Tea-brewing people depicted in the murals donned both Han-style clothes and Khitan-style clothes, and tea sets as water boilers, teapots, tea cups, tea rollers, and the brewing procedures adequately revealed the prevalence of tea drinking in the Sixteen Prefectures of Yan Yun, controlled by officials in the Liao Dynasty. It is worth noting that tea brewing methods depicted in the murals of Liao resembled Song-style "dian-cha" (pouring water on tea powders several times) rather than tea mixed with fresh milk. Tea drinking was available only to the literati and officialdom class in the Liao Dynasty.

In the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), the Mongolians entered the central plains and intermingled with the Han group. Thus two cultures —farming culture and nomadic culture—tended to be fused. The Mongolians created drinks of their own flavor with dairy products in the tea. Yuan people had a variety of ways of tea frying and drinking, such as wolfberry tea, Yumo tea (milled in jade ware), gold tea, green tea, fried tea, Langao tea, Sichuan tea, Xifan tea, vine tea, Hai'er tea, and Suqian (crispy pastry). When the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) rolled around, there was no longer any record concerning yak butter tea consumed by the Han people south of the Great Wall. However, tea became all the rage among nomadic ethnic groups like Mongolians after the Ming Dynasty.

The academic circles split on such issues as when tea was introduced to Xizang and at what time tea went viral, becoming a necessity for the Tibetan people residing in Xizang. The existing materials have revealed that large numbers of horses were needed for military use in the Song Dynasty. That's why Song turned to Tubo for the tea-horse trade, the then local kingdom on the edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau with fewer conflicts and wars. Tea imported into Tubo was long-growth-phased "old tea", rather than "tender tea" drunk by the Han people. Gradually tea became widely consumed among the Tubo people. Their way of brewing tea with yak butter was no different from what it is doing now. By the early Qing Dynasty (1616-1912), tea-drinking customs swept across the Ü-Tsang (including present-day Lhasa, Shannan, Gaze, and Ngari of Xizang Autonomous Region), as the literature accounts.

Most foreign scholars observed that tea was introduced into Xizang after the 10th century AD. Portuguese Jesuits Antonio de Andrade and Manuel Marques were the first Westerners to enter Xizang. In 1623, they arrived at Tsaparang, the capital of the then Guge Kingdom (present-day Ngari Prefecture of Xizang Autonomous region) in western Xizang. Andrade mentioned in his 1624 report that coarse silk, porcelain and tea imported from the Ming Dynasty reached Guge via Ü-Tsang. The first Westerner to mention brick tea was William Moorcroft, who elaborated in 1819 on the compressed square tea bags in Leh, Ladakh: "These tea bags, from Lhasa and Yer-khen, wrapped in yak skin, are covered with yellow paper with Chinese written characters on it."

The spread of tea from the central plains to the northern and southwestern ethnic areas is of great significance in the history of the Chinese nation. It is a two-way process. Instead of passively accepting tea, ethnic groups in the north and southwest skillfully combined tea with dairy products based on their own ethnic features and distinguishing dietary habits so as to develop tea-drinking methods and customs with their own characteristics.

Border Tea Trade promoting ethnic integration in China

In ancient times, various ethnic groups in China developed their own ways of living and production, the most important of which were the farming area south of the Great Wall and the nomadic area north of the Great Wall. The two different and complementary economic and cultural types thereby became the internal economic and cultural roots of China's unified multi-ethnic country.

While tea flowed northward and westward from the hinterland, local specialties such as horses, wool, leather, medicinal materials, musk, and placer gold from the northern steppe and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau were continuously transported to the hinterland. Such economic exchanges and contacts between agricultural and pastoral areas, affecting the lives and production of people of all ethnic groups, constituted a mutually dependent and complementary natural economic zone within the Chinese territory.

Various ethnic groups worked in cooperation throughout the whole chain of production, processing, shipment and sales. The production and circulation of border tea provided large numbers of jobs, with which hundreds of thousands of households were connected, and many tea-related institutions and families lived on it as tea growers, tea dealers, tea shops, tea carriers, mule and horse leasers, tea processors, and packers. Some of them worked full-time, while some might engage in the relevant work during the slack season to add to their family income.

The vast business network of border tea trade linked not only the border areas with the hinterland but also China with the broad world as Russia, and South Asian countries. The network, in which tea agents and middlemen played a critical role, had a relatively independent management system and transportation routes.

Border tea shipment is a long-distance trade. From tea producers in Ya' an on the western edge of the Sichuan Basin, Yiyang in Hunan Province and Zhaoliqiao in Hubei Province to the final destinations, tea merchants have roughly bumpy roads to walk, numerous rapids and shoals to stride, snowy mountains and meadows to climb over, and rainy and stormy weather to brave. Robbers could also be encountered at any time. Tea traders incessantly carried the tea either on their backs or on horseback to the Mongolian steppe and Xizang from one stop to another.

Tibetan tea (tea mainly consumed by Tibetan people in Xizang Autonomous Region and other Tibetan-inhabited regions) is living proof. During the period of the late Qing Dynasty and the early years of the Republic of China (1912-1949), the amount of the border tea supplied to Xizang and other Tibetan-inhabited regions from Ya' an ran up to 110,000 dan (approximately 5,500 kilograms) each year, which required about 100,000 carriers to carry the tea. They went on the rugged mountain roads from Ya' an to Kangding all year round. After the tea was transported from Ya' an and other places to Kangding, it was resold to the local merchants who mainly traveled between Kangding and Xizang. The tea bound for Xizang needed a second wrapping——the bamboo strips were removed from the tea strips and rewrapped with the yak hides to make them suitable for highland yaks and mules.

A vast transportation network, rather than one road alone, performed to transport tea from the tea-producing areas, namely Ya' an on the western edge of the Sichuan Basin and western Yunnan to Xizang. It was a road system consisting of three main routes, namely Sichuan-Xizang Road, Yunnan-Xizang Road and Qinghai-Xizang Road, supplemented by numerous branches and auxiliary lines, spanning Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai and Xizang, and extending outward to South Asia, West Asia, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

Zhu Yuanzhang, Emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, made an incisive evaluation of the role of border tea: "Thin and inconspicuous as it appears, it is of great use. Such is tea." Since the Tang and Song dynasties, the border tea trade, a crucial link to maintain the contact between dynastic states in the central plains with the border ethnics in northern, northwestern, and southwestern regions.

References:

[1] Bertsch, Wolfgan, The use of tea bricks as currency among the Tibetans, The Tibet Journal, vol. 34, no. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 25-80.

[2] MacFarlane, Alan & Iris MacFarlane, Green Gold: The Empire of Tea, translated by Hu Xilin, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2016, p. 53.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of DeepChina.

The author is Liu Zhiyang, professor of the Department of Anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University.