Decades ago, heavy loads of tea were hauled by hand along Sichuan’s rugged trails. “I can still feel the pain,” one 89-year-old former porter says.
Writer and National Geographic Society Explorer Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile storytelling odyssey across the world in the footsteps of our human forebears. He sends this dispatch from Sichuan Province, in China.
TIANQUAN COUNTY, SICHUAN PROVINCE, CHINA
“I saw them when I was a young boy. They were always bent over.”
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…