Visiting Yunnan, China, Where the Traditions of Ancient Trade Routes Persevere

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“They'd come from there,” said Qing Lao, pointing a leathery finger at the snow-cloaked mountains from where the caravans would appear. We were in Niding, a tiny hamlet cradled by the mountains of northern Yunnan, in the southwest of China, drinking yak-butter tea around Lao's kitchen stove. I was coaxing him to dive deeper into his memory.

He recalled shreds of those days in the 1960s and ’70s when mule-drawn caravans plying the old trade route were still common, the copper clang of their bells and throaty giddyups of trailing porters echoing through the valley, and how he and his neighbors would jump into action upon the caravans' arrival. They'd relieve mules and porters of their backbreaking loads: black sugar, wooden bowls, and hundreds of pounds of pu-erh, the region's fermented black tea, tightly packed into bricks. They'd tend to blistered skin and frostbitten fingers, feed the animals, and send the men to the 12 village homes to rest up in advance of the monthlong trudge to Lhasa that lay ahead. Little was expected in return. “We're all Tibetans, mountain folk,” Lao said, pouring me another cup. “We knew the hardships they'd been through.”

Niding was one of the last supply stations for caravans traveling west along the Tea Horse Road, a loosely defined tangle of trading routes between several provinces in southern China and Tibet that are over 1,200 years old. The branch in Yunnan winds through rivers and gorges, from the steamy, tea-rich valleys in the south to the barren highlands of the Tibetan Plateau. It was carved out to facilitate the exchange of pu-erh tea—at the time pricier than porcelain and silk—for hardy horses, musk, and medicinal herbs.

The last few caravans trickled through in the 1980s, when mechanical transport had begun to take over as the more economical option. These days the road, paved over in China's rush to modernize, lives mostly in memory. I had come with my Mandarin-speaking wife and our son, to find what's left of those old days, a period when Tibetan tea merchants, not tourists, thronged the streets of Yunnan. In a time when the influence of Beijing can reach even the farthest corners of mainland China, Yunnan—home to almost half of China's ethnic minorities, including the Naxi, who arrived from northwest China as well as much of Greater Tibet—is striving to keep its traditional culture alive. It's a bastion of preservation, even as China pushes to bring in additional tourism dollars. More than 20 years ago, the Chinese government renamed the village of Zhongdian to Shangri-La, after the fictitious Tibetan village in the English writer James Hilton's 1933 fantasy novel Lost Horizon, in the hopes of luring travelers. More recently, luxury infrastructure has arrived that seeks to honor, rather than exploit, the land and its history. This includes a new circuit from Lux hotels that helps bring alive stories from what's left of the Tea House Road, which runs from the bustling town of Lijiang in the south up to Benzilan in the north.

After stocking up on bags of sour mulberries and a salty pickled plum at Lijiang's morning market—a maelstrom of clattering mopeds and vendors hawking mushrooms, tea, and medicinal herbs in the dozen different Yunnanese dialects—we drove north. Once the city's suburban sprawl thinned out, the road snaked through pine forests and wide valleys where rice terraces seemed to ooze down the slopes like molten lava. Yulong Snow Mountain's peak occasionally appeared over the craggy hills. As the altitude increased with every turn, the packets of sunflower seeds we'd brought to snack on slowly began to inflate.

The road tapered to an end at Baoshan Shitoucheng (Stone Town), a Jenga-like stack of houses designed in the Naxi style, with airy courtyards and tiled roofs, which tumbled downward toward the upper stretches of the Yangtze. We strapped our luggage onto a mule and continued on foot, down a jumble of steps polished smooth over centuries. The village's remoteness put it late in China's march to modernize, and seemingly little had changed since these stones were laid during the Tang Dynasty some 1,300 years ago. Piglets scurried around crumbling courtyards, and vats of sorghum bubbled on wood-fired stoves, ready to be distilled into throat-scorching baijiu, a local liquor. Electricity arrived only in the early 2000s. The village folk, their faces weathered by time and hard work, seemed to have been sitting here for ages, chain-smoking and playing cards under the trees.

Xiuyun Zhang, the sprightly caretaker of Lux's Tea Horse Road Stone Town outpost, welcomed us with tea and crab apple lemonade. With just six rooms, the Stone Town lodge feels more like a homestay than a retreat. Zhang is well into her 50s but one of the younger locals in this time warp of a town. Courtyards stood empty, their gates locked by a generation that left to chase big-city dreams and bigger paychecks. The last of Stone Town's schools closed a decade ago. As in many of China's rural corners, kids are sent off to faraway boarding schools from a young age.

When she's not managing the hotel, Zhang works as a botanist at her farm, a 40-minute walk across the valley. Her expertise in heirloom seed varieties has brought her to conferences in Mexico, Italy, and Peru. Three rare types of corn bear her name. Would she ever want to follow the money and move to the city, I asked? “My father always told me it doesn't matter where you go, as long as you work hard,” she said. “When you plant a seed and care for it, it'll grow. Even if it's in an empty place.”

The next morning we traced the Yangtze downstream, passing more fir forests and rice fields until we reached the village of Daju, near a river bend where the tea horses used to cross. Tiny stone cats, believed in Naxi folklore to ward off evil, sat atop the upward-curved roofs of the buildings. Inside one of them, a dongba—a priestly wise man of the Naxi—named Guowei He received us with loquats from his garden, which we ate gratefully, the mouth-puckering juice dribbling down our chins.

Scrolls and sheer sheets of paper lay scattered on the table. Dancing across them were inky dongba characters, an ancient Naxi script predating written Chinese and one of the world's last pictographic writing systems still in use. It takes a student at least 10 years to master, the dongba told me, and even though the local government promotes its preservation (look closely above the entrance of Lijiang's Starbucks to find dongba glyphs spelling out the brand's name in homonym), its legacy rests largely in the aging hands of masters like He. Given the layer of dust he had to wipe off the tools he showed us, it seemed likely that his classroom had seen busier days. When I asked how many students he still taught, he laughed. “A lot, but they rarely show up.”

Halfway through our drive to Shangri-La, the style of the villages changed abruptly. Replacing the low-slung Naxi dwellings that had so far dotted the landscape were Tibetan farmhouses, with rammed-earth walls and ornate window frames, that rose from fields of barley and tobacco. Bone-white chortens lit up the distant hilltops. Signs on the identical storefronts lining the road bore Tibetan's spidery script.

Ethnic Tibetans make up 80 percent of Shangri-La's population, but on the cobblestone lanes of Dukezong, the city's temple-studded historic quarter, it's the Han Chinese who stroll around in Tibetan garb. These days digital clout, not tea, is Shangri-La's main commodity, and costume rental shops run a brisk trade of fur-trimmed chuba robes and bejeweled headwear. At the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery, a layer cake of whitewashed walls and gilded roofs, I met the head abbot for tea in his office and asked what he thought of the state-owned ticket booth outside the gate and the rabbles of cosplaying day-trippers using his temple, the largest Tibetan monastery in Yunnan, as a photo backdrop. He smiled and shrugged.

I preferred Benzilan, the town you enter just before Yunnan tips into present-day Tibet. Even though thickset Mandarin characters on every wall extolled the virtues of the Chinese Dream, Xi Jinping's campaign to rejuvenate Chinese nationalism, the town had a frontier feel, as if Beijing's hawkeyed gaze hadn't yet crept over the moonscape mountains. (Still, cameras watch from every corner.) It was here that we met Lao in Niding, after we followed a road zigzagging up the mountains, past prayer wheels spinning into a rainbow blur and sagging tree branches.

One morning in the mountains of Benzilan, Tashi, a local guide with a floppy mop of ink-black hair and a giant Tibetan dzi ring on his finger, took us to the incense-perfumed Ganden Dongzhulin Monastery, which stands sentinel on a narrow cliff. Unlike at Ganden Sumtseling, we shared this riot of gold and silk and a hundred gods peering down from Thangka-painted walls with only a handful of others: burgundy-robed monks in flashy sneakers and Tibetan pilgrims who fingered prayer beads and murmured incantations. On the way back we stopped at a dusty corner store to buy bags of milk and unlabeled jars of baijiu rice liquor (in odd quantities, since even numbers are considered bad luck), which, for good fortune, we emptied over the head of a marble Buddha that sat among a thousand prayer flags.

Our journey ended where it had begun, in Lijiang, where I met Rongui Gu in a timber-framed teahouse crammed with pu-erh disks and lace-fine mahogany carvings. As the last tea trader in a succession of 18 generations, he had crossed the Himalayas seven times. On a map scribbled on paper made from tree bark, he showed me the route he would take, which went from Lijiang to Lhasa, then southward to Kolkata. He said he often had to ward off tigers and bandits. His hands bore the scars of the rocky ridges he'd climb to forage medicinal herbs along the way.

These days his tea trade is less arduous, but he's determined to carry the Tea Horse Road's story onward with the small museum he operates above his shop. He gestured at the cafés around us, pointing out the Old Town's UNESCO designation and the costumed tourists moseying through. “All this wouldn't be here without the tea traders' perseverance,” he said. “It's my responsibility to pass on the spirit of the caravan. It's not just a route, but a way of life. If nobody does it, its real history will fade.”

Exploring Yunnan

Getting there

Yunnan is located in southwest China, and many of its main cities, like Lijiang and Dali, have regional airports. The area has good high-speed rail between most major stops as well as solid infrastructure for driving between the villages, historical sites, and the countryside.

Where to stay

Lux Hotels' Tea Horse Road route takes guests through Yunnan on three-to-nine-night stays along the old trade route. Travelers overnight in up to eight different lodges, including Lux Tea Horse Road Sangushui, which has 15 light-flooded rooms overlooking the Yangtze and a restaurant in a century-old courtyard. At Lux Tea Horse Road Shangri-La, guests eat buckwheat noodles for breakfast while looking over the gilded temples. At Lux Tea Horse Road Lijiang, guests stay in the heart of the Old Town, immersed in Naxi culture. Excursions include intimate tea ceremonies with Tibetan priests as well as hikes through the countryside. Each of Lux's eight properties can also be booked independently.

Where to eat

In the heart of Old Lijiang, Tongxinfu Tea House is crammed with paper-wrapped tea tablets from throughout southern China's growing regions. At the intimate, homestyle Shanxun Yunxiang in the historic Baisha village, beautifully plated tasting menus feature local, seasonal ingredients. In a meadow south of Shangri-La, the new Pioneer Book Store, which also includes a café and a souvenir shop, breathes new life into several traditional Tibetan dwellings. The 15,000-strong collection focuses on literature from the Yunnan region, while postcards, enamel pins, and charming figurines are also available for purchase. Not far away, Ferme Liotard doubles as a table d'hôte showcasing French-Yunnanese fusion dishes with homegrown ingredients. Don't miss the Cabernet Sauvignon aged in terra-cotta jars. Finally, the decade-old Flying Tigers Cafe, in a quiet corner of Shangri-La's Old Town, offers an East-meets-West menu of blue cheese yak burgers, yak dumplings, and local craft beers.

This article appeared in the March 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.

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