The antique Silk Road that connected the Chinese and Mediterranean Worlds for more than a millennium, facilitating the exchange of both goods and cultures, is widely known and celebrated. Less familiar is its more southerly equivalent, the ‘Ancient Tea-Horse Road’ that once linked the lush gardens of southwest China with the frigid wastelands of Tibet and – beyond – the torrid plains of northern India. The latter is also sometimes called the ‘Southern Silk Road’, though this is something of a misnomer, as silk seems never to have played a very important part in the traffic that travelled along it. Web image Frontiers of Tang China c. 700 AD
By contrast, the name ‘Tea-Horse Road’ is both appropriately descriptive, and of considerable antiquity. In this there are clear contrasts with the more northerly Silk Road, which was never known by that name to Chinese annalists of the distant past; rather the designation is thought to have been coined by a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, as recently as 1877. Again by contrast, the name ‘Tea-Horse Road’ – in Chinese chamadao – was in official use from at least the time of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The addition of the word gu or ‘ancient’, making the currently popular name chama gudao or ‘Ancient Tea-Horse Road’ is a much more recent, and even near-contemporary, designation.
Also unlike the Silk Road, which followed a relatively well defined route for much of its length, the Tea-Horse Road was more of a skein of tracks, a network of paths and passages both difficult and diverse, that passed through the immensely difficult terrain of western Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet and Qinghai, over some of the highest, coldest and most inhospitable regions in Asia.
The ‘Heavenly Horses’ of the West
Yet the Tea-Horse Road did share something of importance with the older and more venerable Silk Road, and that something was horses. Ever since the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang (259-10), unified China in the 3rd century BC, the Chinese Empire began to look westward, towards Central Asia, both for trade, and for territorial expansion. An absolutely necessity in this great enterprise was good horseflesh – something China was sadly lacking, but which its nomadic neighbours, Mongols, Turks and Tibetans, possessed in great numbers. Above all, the Chinese desired the ‘heavenly horses’, also known as ‘blood-sweating horses’, of the Ferghana Valley in present-day Uzbekistan. Celestial horse. Painting by Tang Dynasty artist Han Gan (706-83)
Accordingly, the Chinese emperor Wu Di (141-87 BC) despatched missions to the west under the command of the imperial envoy Zhang Qian in 138 BC. The redoubtable Zhang Qian returned to Chang’an – present day Xi’an – thirteen years later and was heaped with praise and honours before going on, in 119 BC, to lead a second expedition to the west of the Tian Shan, effectively establishing diplomatic relations with Ferghana, Bactria and Sogdiana, all of which sent ambassadors to Chang’an, beginning a process of regular diplomatic missions to the Chinese capital. Zhang Qian returned via the southern rim of the Tarim Basin, bringing with him a gift of exquisite Ferghana horses for Emperor Wu Di. About a decade later another Chinese emissary returned the favour when he visited the Kingdom of Anxi or Parthia, taking with him gifts of fine silk, a fabric unknown at that time to the west of the Pamirs.
The foundations of future trade along the ancient Silk Road were thus put in place. Many rare and valuable goods were trafficked in either direction, but the initial, and long continuing basis for East-West commerce remained the exchange of Chinese silk for Central Asian horses.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of good quality horses to the Chinese state. At times of dynastic strength, as under the Han (206BC-220AD), the empire was able to deal, for the most part, on favourable terms with the nomads to the west, but in times of dynastic weakness the situation was reversed, so that lack of steeds from central Asia compounded Chinese military weakness. This conundrum is summed up in the Tang Shu or ‘Book of Tang’, which unequivocally states: ‘Horses are the military preparedness of the state. If Heaven takes away this preparedness, the state will totter and fall’.
The founders of the great Tang Dynasty (618-907), which coincided with the Golden Age of the ancient Silk Road, understood this very well. When the dynasty was founded by Emperor Gaozu (618-26), the state inherited a mere three thousand horses from its weak predecessor, the Sui. Through a combination of military conquest, trade and careful husbandry, by the time of the Emperor Gaozong (649-83) a mere four decades later, the state boasted no fewer than 706,000 horses, a force intended to awe and dominate the nomads of the northwest.
