Out of Eden Walk: Among the tea pickers and plantations in Sichuan, China
National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek’s walk through China led him to encounters with tea pickers and unique stays at tea plantations. His consumption of tea was already high following his walk through India, but in China, Salopek experienced tea like no other. Host Carolyn Beeler speaks with him about the history, culture, and traditions of tea in China.
During a trek across the old trading trails in Sichuan, China, National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek recorded some friends singing along.
Salopek walked through the country as part of his journey, retracing the path of human migration on foot, which is being documented in the Out of Eden Walk project.
Hiking through China required drinking and seeing lots of tea, which Salopek told The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler more about.
Carolyn Beeler: One of the things you wrote about when you were in that region was that these trails, for hundreds of years, were traversed by tea porters. You have photos of these workers in your National Geographic dispatches from your journey, and they show these massive bundles of dried tea much taller and broader than the people carrying them. Can you describe the loads they had and where they were going?
Paul Salopek: Yeah, so for about 250 years, until the last dynasty finished in China, there was a stream of, imagine these high kinds of eastern outliers of the Himalaya mountains, and they’re a stream of porters going back and forth over a stretch of almost, I don’t know, about 200 km. That would be like 130 miles up mountain passes, down into canyons … all of them staggering in one direction towards Tibet, carrying, kind of, cheap black tea from Sichuan into Tibet. And these porters were amazing athletes, [with] almost superhuman feats of crossing these passes, carrying up to 400 pounds of dried tea on their back, wrapped in bamboo packets. It’s hard to imagine.
Wow. That is a staggering load. It sounds like incredibly difficult work. My question is, why were people carrying these loads and not pack animals, especially, as you said, into the 1900s?
Well, the mountains there are just so rugged that they defied the construction of roads for generations. This began, I think, back in the 1700s under the Qing. And I actually interviewed one of the last porters. He was an 89-year-old man who carried tea when he was a teenager. But these walking trails, these tea kid porter trails they called beifu,the porters, basically faded away in the early 1950s when the Chinese government began pushing roads into this area.
So, tell me more about what you heard when you spoke to one of those last remaining tea porters. What did he say?
Well, it wasn’t easy to find one to begin with, because the last of them walked in the 1950s before being replaced by trucks. But I did, in one village, ask around, and found a guy named Wang Shi Cong, and he was 89. He had carried tea when he was [around] 17 or 18, quite young. And he was this elderly man, his face was kind of a mask of leathery flesh, his eyes glittering in it. And he remembered rheumatic knees, exhaustion, sleeping in bamboo inns along these mountains as he carried his load. And he said, “Paul, there were bandits in these mountains back then. You know, today, you get to walk through China. You don’t have to fear about bandits. But we did.” And he said, “They’d never stole the tea from us. What can you do with 400 pounds of tea in the middle of a wilderness, right? They waited until we got paid, and then they hit us when we had a few coins in our pocket on our way back home.” Hazard of the job.
Right. On your journey through Sichuan, you also visited a tea plantation. What did it feel like to walk through that plantation?
Tea plantations are always stunningly beautiful. They look like manicured hedgerows. Here’s this Woody Bush — the genus and species is Camellia Sinensis, it’s the classic tea bush. It evolved in this area, southwestern China, which is part of today’s Tibet, maybe a bit of Burma, and northeastern India. This is the epicenter of tea cultivation, going back 3,000 years. And so, it was a real treat.
And tea is still picked by hand there?
Absolutely. It’s considered like premium tea. You know, machine cutting would never make the cut for quality. So, handpicked tea is often the best. These folks were masters at it, as you might imagine. They were quite old. This is not just this tea plantation, but everywhere in China, in rural China, it’s mainly elderly people who are left knowing kinds of farming jobs, including this remote hilltop plantation. People in their 70s, even older in their 80s, use their thumbnail and index finger to pluck off the last tiny tip of the branch, which they call white tea. The palest, youngest little tips of leaves, premium tea.
You mentioned this region as the cradle of tea cultivation. Is this where tea drinking got its start?
As far as people know, I mean, it’s really hard to pinpoint it. There are all kinds of legends, and everybody wants to be the cradle of tea. But botanists say pretty much wild tea, if you date back the genes through time, probably originated in these hills. Yeah, it was the first sip of tea that happened somewhere around this temple.
And was the tea there especially delicious?
Oh my God, Carolyn. I mean, if you like tea, it is like being in heaven. Because they have black teas, they have green teas. They have brown teas. They have yellow teas. They have white teas. White tea being kind of the most elite, which is what these people were harvesting. It was quite an essential experience. Yeah.
I know there are parts of the world where a cup of tea first is a prerequisite for anything … an interview or conversation coming into someone’s home. Tell the truth, by the end of your time in China, were you ready for maybe a cup of coffee or a break from all the tea?
Well, you know, for better or for worse, coffee has invaded China. So, in the big cities and cosmopolitan centers, younger people do not drink as much tea as their elders. They’re drinking Starbucks or the Chinese versions of Starbucks, right? So, tea has some competition now.
You say that more young people are drinking more coffee. Is there any fear that tea drinking and tea cultivation, these great traditions in China, will die out eventually?
You know, I don’t know the answer to that, but my sense is no, I don’t think, I don’t want to go that far. I mean, it’s so embedded in a sense of comfort, a sense of greeting, a sense of welcome is to have a little glass of tea. It’s ingrained in almost, kind of, daily rituals.
Listen to the full interview by clicking on the blue audio player above.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk and also at @InsideNatGeo.
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