Infrastructure brings connectivity

If during the Song Dynasty, the Ancient Tea Horse Road showed that tea could buy horses and secure borders, it has now evolved into a far more complex calculus

The Ancient Tea Horse Road was a vast transport network in Southwest China that gradually developed over centuries through trade, particularly the exchange of tea for horses. It connected the country’s inland areas with the border regions and further to South and Southeast Asia. Three main routes — the ancient Qinghai-Xizang route, the longest and primary Sichuan-Xizang route, and the enigmatic Yunnan-Xizang route — formed the backbone of this vast network of trade routes.

Beyond its economic function, the road served as a cultural bond and a contemporary bridge for cultural integration, ethnic interaction and civilizational dialogue.

First emerging in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), the tea-horse trade spanned more than 1,000 years, which, to some degree, lay in the profound recognition that tea was not merely a commodity but a cultural bond. Tea served as a vital medium for emotional and cultural connection with people living in the Xizang autonomous region.

Today, that same logic of connection is being rewritten at an entirely different speed and scale.

In Yunnan province, for example, along the Kunming-Mohan Expressway, the Nakeli highway integrates transport function with heritage displays, turning service areas into cultural spaces. On Jingmai Mountain, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage site, unmanned aerial vehicles have been deployed for low-carbon aerial tourism, reconciling ecosystem protection with experiential access. These innovations are not isolated experiments — they are part of a systematic national strategy to transform heritage corridors into engines of sustainable development, where culture drives economy rather than being consumed by it. ​

The results speak volumes. In 2025, Yunnan received more than 4.9 million inbound tourists, a 51.8 percent year-on-year increase. To meet soaring overseas demand, the province launched over 70 itinerary products linking major gateway cities with Yunnan’s heritage routes. When cultural assets are treated as core experience drivers, economic gains naturally align with heritage preservation.

Of course, the tea policies of the Song Dynasty offer a cautionary note. While the dynasty-led trade built vital roads and secured border horses through taxation, its excessive revenue extraction and strict monopoly pushed many smallholder tea growers toward livelihood collapse and progressively compressed the space for free border exchanges that local ethnic communities had long relied on. The historical record shows a lopsided structure: Sichuan’s western prefectures grew disproportionately dependent on a single cash crop as official monopsony squeezed informal markets, narrowing trade channels and fraying the cultural ecology of the corridor. The lesson is not that fiscal ambition is wrong, but that short-term revenue extracted at the expense of ecological diversity and cultural-autonomy balance is self-defeating.

In March 2013, the State Council, China’s Cabinet, officially announced that the Tea Horse Road, jointly promoted by Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan provinces, has been included in the seventh batch of major historical and cultural sites protected at the national level. This marked its transformation from a historical concept into a cultural relic entity protected by national law.

Today, Yunnan’s Ancient Tea Horse Road cultural parks and the proposed unified protection plan span Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces, and the Xizang autonomous region. Local legislation, such as Pu’er tea’s regulations for protecting the cultural heritage of the Tea Horse Road, which took effect in March, embeds legal safeguards against over-commercialization. The government positions itself as a “guardian of rules” and a “platform builder” — coordinating stakeholders, setting standards and ensuring fairness. This institutional innovation, combining legal protection, inter-provincial coordination and market-friendly regulation, presents a distinctly Chinese approach to heritage governance.

The most important evolution, however, is not in governance models but in scale. The Tea Horse Road’s original genius was its capacity to connect — across mountains, cultures and political boundaries. Today, that mission continues through infrastructure and cultural connectivity.

Connectivity projects designed under the national strategic goals of ecological civilization and common prosperity now connect history with the present and are reshaping the economic geography of Southwest China. The China-Laos Railway, operational since late 2021, has transformed landlocked Laos into a land-linked hub, cutting travel time from Kunming to Vientiane to under 10 hours and boosting cross-border freight volumes year after year. The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor envisions a multimodal passage from Yunnan to the Indian Ocean, opening a strategic outlet that bypasses the Strait of Malacca.

These are modern upgrades of the ancient Southern Silk Road — a network that included not only the Tea Horse Road but also the broader “Southwest Silk Road” stretching through Yunnan into Myanmar, India and beyond. What people in the Song Dynasty understood intuitively — that tea could buy horses and secure borders — has evolved into a far more complex calculus: Infrastructure brings connectivity, which builds trust and sustains a shared regional future. The Belt and Road Initiative has turned this ancient logic into a global framework, demonstrating that connectivity — whether by caravan or by high-speed rail — remains the surest path to shared prosperity.

Today’s railways and expressways extend the mission of the ancient paths. Where mule caravans once carried Pu’er tea bricks over the Hengduan Mountains, electric locomotives now haul electronics and agricultural products across borders. Where traders once exchanged stories around campfires, digital platforms now facilitate customs clearance and multimodal logistics. The scale has changed, but the essential purpose endures: to traverse mountains, bridge cultures and connect the world.

For heritage governance, the Tea Horse Road’s dynamic, adaptive and outward-looking nature offers an example. If we freeze it in time as a relic for tourists, we betray its very nature. But if we understand it as a living template for connectivity — one that informed and anticipated today’s Belt and Road corridors — then its legacy is not merely preserved. It is fulfilled.

From the hardships of Sichuan tea farmers during the Song Dynasty to the thriving cultural tourism in present-day Yunnan; from the Tang Dynasty’s (618-907) early tea-horse exchanges to today’s international transport corridors, the Ancient Tea Horse Road has always been defined by its capacity to transcend: crossing mountains, uniting diverse peoples, and bridging eras. Its true value lies not in how heavily it is commercialized, but in whether it can withstand the test of time. Through co-creation, co-building and shared benefits, China is demonstrating that heritage preservation and economic progress are not a zero-sum choice — they are mutually reinforcing.

The author is the director of the Chinese Tibetan Tea Culture Research Center at Sichuan Agricultural University.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.