A closer look
Forget your cozy morning cup of chamomile; the origins of tea commerce involved staring down sheer cliffs into a raging river. The Ancient Tea Horse Road was a brutal, dizzying network carved into the Himalayan mountains. Human porters and mule caravans hauled up to 200 pounds of compressed tea bricks through freezing altitudes just to trade them to Tibetans for war horses. Today, tourists hike this exact terrifying gorge route, completely out of breath, trying to process how ancient humans carried boulders of tea up the same path.
