Fire Horse Year & Tea Horse Road

 Salvete Omnes,

Chinese zodiac - Fukuoka, Japan

the Lunar year of Fire Horse started on February 19th.  May this new year bring peace and prosperity to all.

Today's post will be about tea, mules and horses.

The Chamadao or Chamagudao or the Ancient Tea Horse Road was the trade route between  Tang China and Tibet and Bengal. 

Along with silk and porcelain the teas of China became quite early essential  commodities for the external markets and coveted Chinese imports. 

For more than a thousand year Chinese caravans of tea-horse (mule) muleteers and porters carried packaged tea from Chengdu in Sichuan & Kunming in Yunnan,  from Pu'er & Dali regions of tea growing and production to the Tibetans of  Lhasa and other centers of power, to the Nepalis further west and to the Bengali yet further to  the southwest, all  across the Himalayan mountains and plateaus. 

Since horses did not breed well in the main Han China provinces, then the Chinese export of tea & silk etc led to the exchange of  those much coveted Tibetan-bred horses  for tea etc. 

Tibetan pony

The Song Dynasty, very poor in good horses for their cavalry due to their wars with the  Jin Dyansty and Mongols, is known for importing the Naqu/Hequ horses from Tibetan breeders.

Hequ horse of Tibet

Hequ horse

Hequ horse

.

Teas from the Chinese cultivation areas was harvested by hand, dried, fermented and shaped into bricks and cakes, the final products wrapped in bamboo leaves & husk or tree bark for travel. For six months the tea caravans would trek the road until reaching their desired market destinations. 

The Chinese tea drinking spread to India, Mongolia, Central Asia and Japan, and much later to Muscovy and Europe. 

Valete

Tatar cowboys lassoing horses in the Altai steppe- Ossendowski

Salvete Omnes,

in the early 1910s to 1930s there was this Polish traveler, journalist, history and adventure writer: Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski, internationally famous for his book on Lenin and his book on the Siberia and Mongolia during the Bolshevik Revolution, including his conversations with Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, 

conqueror of Outer Mongolia and failed anti-Bolshevik crusader.

So in his book Man and Mystery in Asia pan Antoni  tells a number of stories that originated in his voyage to Siberia in 1899, while still a university student. So while traveling with already famous geologist,  prof.  Stanislaw Zalewski (Polish scientists working for the Russian Empire were exploring Siberian mountains and vastness for more then a century at that time - the most famous being Stanislaw Czerski) described the lassoing and taming of the semi-wild horses by the Tatars in the Altai steppe.

Oriat tipi-like yurt

 The Altai Tatars aka the Oriats, being Buddhists, were native to these regions and were under the assault from the Russian bureaucracy and colonists (in this narrative they were Ukrainians from Russian Ukraine mostly), who would rob them of their horses and kill the Tatar owners...

.

Nota bene, they say when Red Army liberated from the Nazi Germans the area around Warsaw, Poland, the NKVD (later KGB) came to the cemetery where Ossendowski was buried, and opened his grave in order to make sure that this famous anti-Bolshevik and anti-Communist was actually deceased. 
There was another Polish witness to Baron Ungern's rule in Mongolia - Kamil Gizycki who wrote a book on his experiences there in 1920-21 and his subsequent route to Harbin, China, and Poland. 

Valete 

French Republican Guard charging

 Salvete Omnes,

today, a short entry concentrated on the video recording from 1975, when four squadrons of the French    Republican Guard recreated a cavalry charge - video. 

.

.

Valete