photo #8165088

Meet Chen Shou Kang: friendly, bald, energetic even in his 80s, the unofficial historian of the village of Wayao Guan, located in the lumpy mountains of western China. Chen is remembering the last beifu he ever saw. Beifu: the legendary tea porters who for 250 years shouldered impossible burdens of black tea over the eastern Himalaya and into Tibet. Across generations of such trade, perhaps two million bearers may have inched over China’s perilous tea roads, carrying individual loads as heavy as a modern refrigerator. They did this wearing grass sandals or barefoot, over 11,000-foot elevations, for weeks at a stretch. Often, they managed only a few dozen steps before pausing from exhaustion. At his small museum in Sichuan, village historian Chen Shoukang shows how a porter would use a sweat scraper. Paul Salopek “They were poor. They had no other choice,” old Chen explains. “By the 1950s they were replaced by trucks.” Rummaging through his backroom museum, Chen suddenly grins. He holds up an object made of bamboo: a strange, bladelike tool. It is an antique “sweat wiper” designed to scrape perspiration from the brows and eyes. A long time ago, it once dangled by a string from the wooden pack frame of a tea porter. An artifact from an emphatically bygone era. From a different planet. A relic of extreme human experience—of boggling endurance—that today is virtually impossible to access or comprehend. I am walking across the world. The heaviest item in my rucksack is a laptop computer weighing two pounds. On this segment of my trek through China, I am joined by three philosopher friends. Li Mengchi is a seeker who guides tourists into the deserts of Arabia. Yang Wendou is a sage who teaches schoolchildren Yunnanese culture. And Cheng Xinhao is the brilliant maker of conceptual art videos. Walking, they argue the merits of idealism over realism, of memory over forgetting. They sing the Mandarin version of “The Internationale” in the driving rain. Together we hike over Erlang Shan, a stormy, 11,200-foot massif that once tested the old tea porters’ will. The colossal peak looms over fading trading paths between Kangding—a historic Tibetan outpost of tea markets and icy winters—and Ya’an, a lush, lowland hub of tea production in Sichuan Province, some 130 miles to the east. This rugged borderland is notorious for its hazards. Trekking the old trading trails in Sichuan is no stroll in the park—let alone if you had to shoulder 250 pounds of tea. Out of Eden Walk The ramparts of the Tibetan Plateau knife up from the Sichuan Basin into an austere world of heavy fogs, ice, snow, and strong winds. Landslides and rockfalls are common. We slip, crazy-legged, up and down steep goat trails greased by wet mud. We hopscotch along abandoned roads that are chopped to pieces by flash floods. Dripping cedars loom out of the heavy mists. Rotten snow clings to the blue pine shadows. At rest stops, we sometimes spot curious holes drilled into flat bedrock. These small cavities were worn by the action of thousands of wooden guaizi: the indispensable walking sticks of a vanished army of tea porters. Catching their breath, the tough beifu would fit their t-shaped alpenstocks into such sockets to prop up their enormous packs, which they rarely removed on the trail.