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By the early 1700s, say historians, the expanding Qing Dynasty had pushed into Sichuan’s ethnic Tibetan regions, and began exporting vast consignments of the region’s cheap, dark tea to the peoples of the Himalaya. At its peak, this commerce moved nearly 16 million pounds of tea a year, all of it pressed into dry bricks, and the bulk of it transported from the plantations on human backs. People were more economical conveyances than packhorses. Most of the carriers were men. But women and children sometimes portered too. Their thousands of cargoes ended up steeping in millions of cups of yak butter tea. “Heavy, long-distance carrying is well-known elsewhere in the world, particularly in Nepal,” writes Patrick Booz, an expert on the Chinese tea trade at Columbia University, in New York, “but nowhere else—ever—did porters carry loads of such awful weight, with such little time for rest.” The beifu traversed the length of Sichuan’s tea roads in about 20 days. Their burdens were so crushing they averaged just seven miles a day. Two hundred and fifty pounds was considered a moderate load, Booz notes. But packs tipping 400 pounds weren’t unusual. “I can still feel the pain,” says Wang Shikang, 89, among the last living beifu in the village of Kang Zhi. “I have rheumatism in my knees and back.” Wang Shikang, 89, once carried bricks of tea across the mountains of Sichuan to Tibet. “I have rheumatism in my knees and back,” he says of the physical toll it took. Paul Salopek Wang’s eyes glitter in the leather shield of his face as he recalls his days as a teenager in the twilight of the foot trade, before paved roads penetrated the region during World War II. He slept on plank beds with scores of other rag-wrapped carriers at porters’ inns. He gulped cold dumplings to fuel his outraged muscles. Each trek to the alpine tea markets earned a palmful of coins: a survival wage that bought a sackful of corn or rice. “There used to be many robbers between Kangding and Luding,” Wang says loudly, in the way of the hard of hearing. “The bandits couldn’t care less about our tea. They always attacked us on the return trip, after we’d been paid. We walked in groups of 20 for protection.” The wretched beifu faced other hardships. Some were press-ganged into the armies of China’s civil war between communists and nationalists. Porters collapsed of hunger or exposure on frozen mountain trails. Others fell to their deaths. The corpses were rolled into anonymous graves. Their loads were carried on. “But there was happiness even in bitter times,” old Chen, the village historian, tells me. “My grandfather carried a flute along with his heavy load. He played music on rest stops.” Statues at the modern tea-growing center of Ya’an, in Sichuan, honor the porters of old. Paul Salopek Tottering onward in slow columns, Chen says, the beifu swapped jokes and stories to ease their suffering. In mixed groups there was flirting. Such human resilience isn’t reflected in the somber statues honoring the porters in Ya’an, still a tea-growing center. We plod a noisy highway down from the drizzly mountains. Our small party samples tea at modern plantations that pack their harvests into souvenir versions of the bamboo-wrapped tea bricks hauled by the old-time carriers. My colleagues Yang and Cheng debate the role of imagination. (“Dreamers end up with hard lives.”) And on the last miles of the ghostly tea trails of Sichuan, we encounter our first human being on foot: a lone young woman filming herself on a phone, chatting with her followers on social media, as she pushes a cart to Tibet.