The scene of the first academic symposium on the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road World Heritage Application”.
Cultural heritage is a precious, non-renewable resource. Spanning from the early 17th century to the early 20th century, the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road” is a magnificent epic of commercial civilization across time and space. On July 8, the first academic symposium on the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road World Heritage Application” was held in Beijing. Participants from eight provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities across the country held in-depth discussions on research into the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road”, jointly advancing its application for World Cultural Heritage status.
The event was co-hosted by the Institute of Global Common Development of Beijing Normal University and the China Association for the Promotion of Cultural Exchange and Cooperation. The all-media team of China Cooperation Times·Tea Weekly was invited to attend. Today we present the highlights of speeches by 11 of the experts, to deepen everyone’s understanding and knowledge of the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road”.
Wang Hongxin, Dean of the Institute of Global Common Development of Beijing Normal University, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor
“A Single Spark”, Gathering Strength for the World Heritage Application
Real excavation and research into the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road began 15 years ago. The direct documentary origin seems to be the 2006 cultural tourism promotion of Xiamei Village at the foot of Wuyi Mountain, but what actually drove Xiamei’s cultural tourism promotion was the hit TV series “Qiao’s Grand Courtyard” broadcast that year. It can be said that after lying dormant for nearly a century, across a distance of 3,000 li, the provinces of Shanxi (Jin) and Fujian (Min) joined hands once again, opening the road to a revival of commercial civilization in the new century.
The World Heritage application of the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road”, given its enormous span in time and space, is “the most difficult heritage application project in history”, requiring systematic planning, scientific design, coordinated advancement and step-by-step implementation. Over the past two years, affected by the pandemic, the progress of the application work has been directly impacted. Like rowing against the current — if you don’t advance, you fall back. At this moment when the Tea Road application needs a push, the first academic forum on the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road World Heritage Application” aims to unite forces from all sides to jointly promote the success of the application and the revival of commercial civilization, including the development of cultural tourism.
During his 2013 visit to Russia, the General Secretary said that the 17th-century “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road” was a “century artery” connecting China and Russia, which had a tremendous influence; in 2014, the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal and the Silk Road were successively inscribed on the World Heritage List, giving impetus to the Tea Road’s application path. Under the influence of these events, sporadic research began in academic circles in 2013 and 2014, and gradually increased from 2015 and 2016; in 2019, the National Cultural Heritage Administration officially included the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road” in the “Tentative List of World Cultural Heritage of China”, reaching a peak.
I hope we can take this event as an opportunity to achieve solidarity and collaboration across the entire chain of application provinces and cities, to promote the attention of the whole society and the participation of more people, to light the “single spark” of commercial civilization revival, to gather strength for the application and to unite as one.
Zhang Weidong, Vice President of the China Society of Commercial History and Director of the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road Professional Committee
Four Problems to Solve in the Tea Road’s World Heritage Application
As an international trade route from China to the Mongolian steppes and Russia, radiating to Central Asia and Europe, the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road has important historical and contemporary value. The earliest research on the Tea Road was conducted mainly by veteran experts and scholars from Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, who mostly published articles and monographs from the perspectives of the Shanxi (Jin) merchants, their draft banks and the merchants who travelled in Mongolia.
In March 2019, the National Cultural Heritage Administration issued a letter officially agreeing to include the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road” in the “Tentative List of World Cultural Heritage of China”, with 45 heritage sites. This is an important milestone and also a new starting point. Through the efforts of recent years, the Tea Road application has entered a track of standardized operation and steady progress. However, some problems remain in the research on the Tea Road and in advancing the application.
First, the research community is relatively scattered and lacks cooperation and exchange. There is no national-level research institution and no renowned experts or scholars acting as leaders, nor has the subject been included in national-level key projects for continuous advancement; research results are not systematic enough and their quality is uneven.
Second, academic research and application-promotion work are developing unevenly, with a fairly large “temperature gap”. For example, among the application sites, Duolun in Inner Mongolia is an important node on the steppes south of the Gobi with historical and cultural value and a commodity distribution function, yet it has not been included in the list.
Third, current academic research and application work show, to varying degrees, tendencies of localism — overemphasizing the status and value of one’s own locality, competing to be first and claiming to be the only one — which is one-sided.
Fourth, we lack connection and exchange with research institutions, experts and scholars in Russia and Mongolia. The Tea Road application likewise requires cooperation with Mongolia and Russia.
He Mingjian, Director of the People’s Congress of Duolun County, Xilingol League, Inner Mongolia
Connecting the Cities Along the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road
On August 1, Duolun County on the Xilingol grassland will host the 8th “China–Mongolia–Russia Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road City Cooperation Conference”. The theme of this conference is: sharing achievements and promoting the integration of tea culture, the tea industry and tea technology. The conference has several tasks: first, releasing the revised full map of the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road; second, releasing the Tea Road reader; third, launching the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road International Expo Conference” project; fourth, launching the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road Digital Museum” project, and so on. The Tea Road route does not hold up without Duolun. The Zhang–Ku Avenue runs from Zhangjiakou to Kulun (Ulaanbaatar), and Duolun is a necessary passage. In the Qing Dynasty and the Republican era, Duolun was a famous city beyond the Great Wall.
Regarding the application: first, cultural research is the vehicle of the application. Research on Tea Road culture needs to connect the cities and to connect the experts and scholars of every region, so as to form a force — working alone without interaction will not do. The Tea Road must also bring in Mongolian and Russian experts and scholars; only then can the application be truly meaningful.
Second, through inter-city linkage, the economy and culture of a region should be invigorated. For example, Anren Town in Sichuan cooperated with Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) to build a town combining “tea spaces”, “tea technology”, museums and more.
Third, in the future a China–Mongolia–Russia Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road rally can be organized to get the cities along the route interacting, and eventually the rally can go abroad, making the Tea Road a real carrier that brings economic interaction, cultural exchange and mutual learning between cities.
Feng Xiaoguang, Executive Dean of the Chibi Qingzhuan (Green Brick) Tea Research Institute, Hubei Province
The Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road Is Not a Road, but an Economic Flow
The Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road is not a road, but an economic flow. First, the Tea Road has a great many sources. Wuyi Mountain, Yangloudong and Anhua in Hunan are representative sources, but the true sources are not limited to these. Anhui, for example, is a blank — it has not yet been included in the eight-province application scope; and I believe Hunan has also left out many places, as have Zhejiang and Jiangsu. Seen this way, the Tea Road is very complex: with especially many sources and great complexity in between, it forms a network — it simply cannot be a single road.
The upper section of the Tea Road starting from Yangloudong runs through Hubei and Henan (the upper section starting from Wuyi Mountain runs through Fujian and Jiangxi), centered on Hankou, and many “little Hankous” emerged — a representative feature. Besides Yangloudong, several new starting points have emerged in Hubei, such as Wufeng. The section of the Tea Road starting from Yangloudong is a waterway all the way to Sheqi in Henan.
The middle section, in my view, is closely tied to the Shanxi merchants. For the Jin merchants, the middle section was a road home. Carrying tea from Wuyi Mountain and Yangloudong northward, they would rest for ten days or half a month when passing through Shanxi, then set out again after returning home to “leave the pass” — and this “leaving the pass” is what I consider the truly crucial section of the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road.
The lower section is the joining and parting of steppe and desert. I believe the route has even more branches in its later part; I have described three representative branches, but there are in fact many more. Especially after reaching Kyakhta and St. Petersburg in Russia, goods were transshipped to the whole of Europe and to Central and West Asia.
Zhao Jing, Deputy Director of the Management Committee of the Shedian Commercial Port Cultural Industry Demonstration Zone, Sheqi County, Henan Province
The Ancient Town of Shedian — an Important Water–Land Transfer Node on the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road
The many node cities on the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road can roughly be divided into three types: first, node towns at the tea origins; second, nodes along the transport route; third, nodes in the end consumer markets. I believe the node towns along the transport route are more representative, because the Tea Road was a comprehensive trade route carrying more than just tea — and the ancient town of Shedian is precisely an important node along the transport route.
The ancient town of Shedian lies in the northeast of the Nanyang Basin in Henan. Known in ancient times as “Sheqidian” (the Inn of the Borrowed Banner), it got its name because Liu Xiu, Emperor Guangwu of the Eastern Han, once “borrowed a banner here to seek out generals and raise an army against Wang Mang”. Beginning in the Han, flourishing in the Ming and reaching its peak in the Qing, it has a history of about 2,000 years, and Shedian’s status as a hub of the Tea Road is irreplaceable.
Shedian’s geographical position is very special: two rivers, the Pan and the Zhao, embrace the ancient town, forming a terrain like “two dragons playing with a pearl”. After the Pan and Zhao converge, they flow into the Tang River, which then runs north into the Han River — this is its waterway. At that time, tea merchants bought tea at Wuyi Mountain in Fujian, transported it to Hekou in Jiangxi, shipped it by water to Hankou, then went north via Xiangyang and the Tang River to the Pan–Zhao rivers, landing at Shedian; there the goods switched to horse caravans, travelling via Luoyang and Jincheng, then through Taiyuan, Datong and Zhangjiakou to Guihua (Hohhot), where they switched to camel caravans via Kulun, reaching Kyakhta, and were then distributed onward to Russia and the countries of Europe. Among the many nodes, the ancient town of Shedian is an irreplaceable water–land transfer point, so its position is extremely important.
Second, the ancient town of Shedian has numerous heritage resources, and they are very well preserved. As a hub on the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road, Shedian currently preserves the most complete tea-road cultural heritage resources, which can be roughly divided into six categories. Among these six categories of relics, the Shan–Shaan Guild Hall (service facilities related to the tea trade), Porcelain Street (a historic district clustering commercial heritage), and the wharf and the Great Stone Bridge (transport heritage) are the backbone of the heritage, covering important material evidence such as the key management facilities of the Tea Road’s distribution section, representative commercial facilities, transport facilities and religious facilities.
Zhang Yue, Director of the Wanlifeng Tea Culture Research Institute, Anhua County, Hunan Province
Attaching Importance to Research on the Evolution of Tea Types and the Tea Road
Culture is the sum of material and spiritual culture. Research on the intangible cultural heritage of the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road must also attach importance to the spiritual-cultural level. Judging from the current state of research, the most easily neglected aspects are tea songs, tea ballads and tea dances, as well as tea rituals and tea customs.
In addition, we should study the evolution of Chinese tea types from the perspective of the changes of the Tea Road — researching the Tea Road in combination with the changes of the times.
Anhua is the “Hometown of Chinese Dark Tea”, and the evolution of Anhua dark tea varieties has interacted with the changes of the Tea Road. The earliest Anhua dark tea was actually only dark raw tea (heimaocha). Anhua dark raw tea was first shipped to Jingyang in Shaanxi, and from Jingyang onward to the pastoral regions. Jingyang was the earliest to make “Fu brick tea” with golden flowers, so people generally came to think that Anhua dark tea consisted only of golden-flowered “Fu brick tea”.
From the perspective of historical evolution, Anhua dark tea is divided into the “Three Jian” (tip grades), the “Four Bricks” and the “One Hua Juan” (flower roll). The earliest Anhua dark tea was loose “raw tea”, packed into a cloth bag or a bamboo-wicker basket for transport to the pastoral regions; later, in the Ming Dynasty, Anhua dark raw tea was steamed soft, packed into wicker baskets, trampled tight in tree-shaped baskets and sun-dried to make “Hua Juan tea” (flower-roll tea). The main purpose of making “Hua Juan tea” was ease of transport: in the desert it was carried by camel, and in the mountains of Anhua by horse. At that time, the largest shippers of Anhua dark tea were the Jin (Shanxi) merchants — and even earlier than the Shanxi merchants were the Shaanxi merchants.
Ulana, President of the Inner Mongolia Grassland Tea Road Association and Deputy Secretary-General of the China Tea People Friendship Association
People-to-People “Tea Diplomacy” with Russia and Mongolia
As a civil organization, the Inner Mongolia Grassland Tea Road Association has travelled the China–Mongolia–Russia Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road for 14 years, covering nearly 100,000 kilometers. From Wuyi Mountain to St. Petersburg, we have strung together 80 cities once connected with the Tea Road.
In November 2014, the Association cooperated with the Wuyishan government to jointly hold the 3rd China–Mongolia–Russia Mayors’ Summit. Wuyishan entrusted us with inviting 25 governors and mayors from Russia and Mongolia, as well as experts and directors, which created considerable influence. In the year following that event, Wuyishan gained 300,000 additional tourist visits — a tangible effect.
Russia is one of the world’s largest tea-consuming countries. Russian children start drinking tea at the age of one and a half; they drink afternoon tea in schools and in the army, funded by special state allocations to schools and the military. After the Tea Road was interrupted, black tea from India and Sri Lanka entered Russia and Mongolia. Over these years we have devoted ourselves to bringing fine Chinese tea, with its 5,000 years of traditional culture, to every ordinary citizen of Russia and Mongolia. Every time we visit Russia and Mongolia, we bring a suitcase of tea — tea is diplomacy. When Russian friends, especially the elderly, receive a piece of Chinese tea we present to them, some even kiss the tea with tears in their eyes, because they feel Chinese tea is the finest drink in the world.
Over the years on the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road, though the journey has been arduous, we are gratified — we have been very fortunate to become part of the Belt and Road Initiative. At present, we are actively preparing to jointly hold a China–Mongolia–Russia Mayors’ Summit before the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Zhao Wenyao, Secretary-General of the Inner Mongolia Grassland Tea Road Association and Correspondent of the Russian magazine “Russia and China”
Clarifying the Basic Concepts Related to the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road”
Based on my many years of research and understanding, there are many concepts related to the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road”, but these concepts actually belong to different levels and are not unified. Here I distinguish three concepts.
First: the tea–horse mutual markets. These originated in the Han, Tang and Song dynasties or even earlier — a form of trade in which feudal dynasties exchanged tea for horses with the ethnic minorities of the northwest. While obtaining what they needed, it also maintained stability and harmony on the frontiers. By the Qing Dynasty — the Qing rulers being a people on horseback who did not need such mutual markets — it was abolished.
Second, the Ancient Tea Horse Road. This refers to the routes that carried Yunnan and Sichuan tea into Tibet and even further afield, along which horses and medicinal materials were also traded.
Third, the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road. This is the route we now specifically refer to — in fact the trade route from the tea-producing regions of southern China, across eight provinces, to the Mongolian Plateau. It is another international trade route that arose on the Eurasian continent after the Silk Road. The Russians call it the “Great Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road”, the Mongolians call it the “Steppe Road”, and President Xi Jinping has called it the “century artery” between China and Russia in the 17th century.
The logistics routes of the Tea Road in this period were in fact very complex, but can basically be divided into four main lines:
The first is the eastern line, namely the Zhang–Ku Avenue. Coming up the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal to the port of Tianjin, then to Tongzhou in Beijing, then to Zhangjiakou — from where shipment began — and on to Kulun. In fact, this road eventually extended to Kyakhta and should be called “Zhang–Qia”, though it is now called the “Zhang–Ku Avenue”.
The second is the western line, which is in fact what we call the Hexi Corridor; the western line is even more complex. Once past Sheqi in Henan, the route began heading west; through Shanxi it kept going west, and into Inner Mongolia it continued west — with very many forks heading west.
The third is what we now call the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road in the narrow sense: with Wuyi Mountain, Chibi and Anhua as its sources, Wuhan as its starting point, passing through Ulaanbaatar and reaching St. Petersburg.
The fourth line is in fact the Maritime Tea Road. This node is quite clear: coming past Chongming Island to the port of Tianjin, then rounding the Korean Peninsula, and finally reaching Vladivostok.
Tian Jian, Director of the Shanxi Merchants Research Institute, Qi County, Shanxi Province
Research on Documents and Historical Materials Plays an Important Role in the World Heritage Application
The application concerns on the one hand the route, but it also requires a body of documents and historical materials.
“Xingshang Yiyao” (Essentials for Itinerant Merchants) is the most complete travel record we have found to date of the journey from Qi County to Anhua, including how tea merchants purchased, selected and processed tea, with fairly detailed operating procedures for every step. At the same time, the book records in relative detail how the Jin merchants handled tea at the source areas of Anhua and Yangloudong, revealing the entire body of rules of the Qi County tea merchants.
“Xingshang Jilüe” (Brief Records of Itinerant Trading) records how Qi County tea merchants handled tea in Fujian in the final years of the Daoguang reign; the operating procedures are detailed throughout, and show that the Jin merchants had a special understanding of local culture wherever they went. For example, it records that upon reaching Wuyi Mountain one must pay homage to the Lord of Wuyi — the local earth god of Wuyi Mountain — and it also contains Confucian, Daoist and Legalist content. The Jin merchants combined the Confucian spirit with the commercial spirit most perfectly, so the spirit of the Jin merchants should also carry international significance.
The historical materials also mention many extant architectural sites, the most typical being the “Heshengyuan Tea House”. The value of these historical materials is rich; we have found that every scholar approaches them from a different angle — some study accounting, some study local customs, some study commercial history, and even students of calligraphy find calligraphic art in them.
Documents and historical materials are of vital importance. I believe that as a next step, the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road should have a fairly standard dictionary explaining its historical origins — this would be a precious legacy in the application process.
Li Xianyun, Deputy Director and Associate Research Fellow of the Zhangjiakou Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Hebei Province
Actively Advancing the Issuance and Implementation of the Conservation and Management Plan
In 2019, the state included the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road in the Tentative List, and the phased work of the cultural relics departments of the eight provinces was basically completed. According to the “Operational Guidelines for World Cultural Heritage”, local governments are the subjects of the application. Taking Zhangjiakou as an example, any heritage site involves not only the culture and tourism department, but may also involve housing and construction, environmental protection, agriculture, forestry and animal husbandry, transport and other departments — it cannot be advanced by the cultural relics department alone. In March 2019, the Hebei provincial government proposed: focus on management and produce the conservation and management plan for the provincial section; local cultural relics departments should focus on in-depth research and good publicity for the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road.
The Tea Road application concerns material culture; everything intangible is supplementary. Material culture means immovable cultural relics — fixed things such as ancient ruins, ancient tomb passages, ancient buildings, modern and contemporary grottoes, stone carvings and others — and this is the focus of the application. The intangible items can only serve as supplements and cannot appear as the objects of the application.
The Tea Road has many nodes; saying it is a network is also fine. But in external presentation, one should not specify concrete routes — for example, saying it passes through a certain village or town is not standardized. Taking Zhangjiakou as an example, do not write “Zhang–Ku Avenue”; simply write “such-and-such section of the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road” — this needs to be unified within the larger framework.
The application text mentions that the important nodes are Zhangjiakou and Hankou — two nodes — so what about the others? The other towns appear as key towns. The application text clearly divides the domestic section into three parts: production; transport and packaging; and export sales.
At present, the main task for Zhangjiakou’s (Hebei section) application is how to convert the achievements. Through in-depth research we have found that we should use intangible cultural heritage to supplement this material heritage. We are now doing oral history, interviewing elderly people who lived through that era, recounting from an oral-history perspective how one travelled from Zhangjiakou to Inner Mongolia and Mongolia; and also about the Jin merchants. We interview anyone connected and preserve video; so far we have compiled 350,000 words.
To advance the application work, we need local governments to get the relevant counties, districts and relevant municipal departments to endorse the relevant “conservation and management plans”, then report them to the provincial cultural relics bureau, which files them with the national administration and returns practically operable content, so as to advance the Tea Road’s World Heritage application.
Yang Zhiwu, Specially Appointed Expert of the Shanxi Provincial Culture and Tourism Expert Advisory Committee and Executive Dean of the Shanxi Culture and Tourism Industry Research Institute
The Tea Road’s Relationships with Ethnic Integration, World Commercial Civilization and the Belt and Road
I believe research on the Ten-Thousand-Mile Tea Road should grasp three relationships. The first is the relationship between the Tea Road and ethnic integration — a new perspective. Here we can find the historical thread of the Jin merchants’ existence; it was not the case that the people of Shanxi suddenly acquired their talent all at once in the Ming and Qing eras. In every period of history, traces of the Jin merchants can be found amid ethnic integration.
The second is the relationship between the Tea Road and the history of world commercial civilization as a whole. Through the Tea Road, the reach of our civilization extended into Europe in commercial form. The Chinese nation has in fact engaged with the outside world not only through the Tea Road and the Silk Road, but through many other means as well. So we should study the relationship between the Tea Road and world commercial civilization.
Third, what is the Tea Road’s relationship with the new era — against the background of the Belt and Road Initiative and the building of a community with a shared future for mankind? The Tea Road’s relationships with ethnic integration, with the development of world commercial civilization and with the Belt and Road Initiative should be studied and defined anew.
Side note: In October 2020, Beijing Normal University established the Institute of Global Common Development, focusing on five areas — global governance and leadership, climate change, ecological civilization, educational development, and culture and tourism — conducting interdisciplinary research to build a new type of university think tank with international influence, contributing to enhancing the country’s soft power and building a community with a shared future for mankind.
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Author: Lam Sam (LamSam), the Old Tea Head
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