CG: That was enough to turn your curiosity into a passion?

JF: Yeah, I was hooked. One of the first things I did was I tried to find a mentor. But the best mentors inevitably are local people who don’t speak much English. So I learned Mandarin specifically to start understanding this terminology of tea. It has a very specific nuance and a very specific language that in English we don’t in many cases even have words for — for the flavour components, the effect of that first rush. I was willing to commit to learning a language to understand a little bit more about their perspectives on tea.

CG: What took you inland from Taiwan?

JF: A Taiwanese tea maker said if you really want to go into tea, you actually have to stop talking about it, stop thinking about it, and go to the heart of it, the origin of all tea. So I took a trip to southwestern Yunnan. In southwestern Yunnan you walk into forests that are centuries old and the forest is tea trees. They grow wild and gnarly like a bizarre orchard. For people there, tea is a fuel and foodstuff, very simple, and yet some of the most coveted teas in the world come from that zone. They’re coveted because they’re produced so simply and so cleanly.

My tea education in Taiwan was detailed, intricate and linguistic; in southwestern Yunnan it was very much a thing of simplicity. There weren’t so many flowery conversations about the leaf, but there was definitely that good feeling again. There is a saying in the mountains that if a cup of tea isn’t offered, a relationship isn’t offered. It’s so simple, and yet it binds communities. I love the lore of tea, I love the feeling of tea, but at the heart of it, I love the way tea binds people to people and moments. It’s a very visceral thing.

Watch: Jeff Fuchs describes the tea culture in Yunnan

CG: How did you go from that to becoming an explorer on the Tea Horse Road?

JF: My first journey to Yunnan, I had planned to do a small expedition, a summit of a mountain [in the northwest], but there was a blizzard, so we didn’t go up. I was stuck for three weeks, and I met a Tibetan named Dakpa, a very charismatic local who had spent much of his childhood in India as a monk. We chummed around and on one walk we were wandering through a little stony mountain pass, and he pointed out this little striding route that went on a diagonal up a mountain, and he said something like, “That’s the walkway that I came back here from India on.” Then I found out that the walk was actually months long and treacherous and you barely have anything but robes to wear and butter tea to drink. He mentioned the Tea Horse Road, and it was like there was a small little hook being put into my skin. So I moved from Taiwan specifically to be amongst the mountains, and made a pledge with Dakpa that somehow we were going tell the story and travel as much as we could. And that never really stopped. It’s still going on now.

The Tea Horse Road is not one main hub highway, it’s a series of striating routes that bend all over the mountains and then reconvene. What astounds me to this day is that we don’t know more about it. A 5,000-kilometre route through the sky, ushering commodities all over the Himalayas, into India, China, Nepal for over 1,300 years, unending, unceasing, and we don’t have much context about it. We know the Silk Road because it touched our hearts as old Europeans, but this is an incredible route that built the Himalayas and not much was written about it.

CG: What is the origin of the name?

JF: It was coined in Mandarin as the Tea Horse Road or the Tea Horse Way. The official designation by the Han people came during the Song Dynasty, when a lot of the Chinese kingdoms were trying to build cavalry. As they were giving tea as a tribute to the warrior masses on the Tibetan plateau, they also discovered that the Tibetans had these war ponies, sort of like the Himalayan equivalent of camels. They were rough, ornery, but they provided a basis for building cavalries, by which these Chinese kingdoms could keep some of the northern peoples away. So it became almost an exchange of sorts, of horses and tea. But you also had medicinals flowing, you had opium being traded, so in some ways maybe the Tea Horse Road moniker isn’t accurate. The Tibetans just called it the Gyalam — the wide road or the tea road.

CG: At the screening of The Tea Explorer in Toronto, you asked the audience to pay attention to a couple of specific characters: a gentleman named Konga in Upper Mustang, Nepal, and an older woman in Yunnan. Why do they stand out for you?

JF: Konga was one of the last of the traders up in Mustang, and he made an impression simply because of his wide-eyed yet gritty ability to sum up the route. He was this rugged pit bull of a man who kept asking us, “Well, why are you interested in me? I’ve done nothing special.” I think it’s a great counterpoint to the hubris in the world of exploration to talk to someone in his 75th year who says almost nothing about himself. You don’t hear the words I, me, my. But in his simple way, he clarified so much of what the route was about. Konga, for me, is the face of the Tea Horse Road. He represents some of the inherent qualities of this trade route — expansive, utterly magnificent and full of humility.

The woman, Drolma, lived very close to me in a small satellite community of northwestern Yunnan, near a place called Benzilan. She was this soft-spoken woman we’d interviewed many times, with hands like cleavers. And she had mentioned how, in the days of the Tea Horse Road, she would go with her father. He was afraid to leave her at home because she was a blossoming beauty. But in that time period, women weren’t supposed to be on the route; it was viewed as a place of danger and risk. So she learned to dress as a boy and then a man. Subsequently she became quite an efficient trader in her own right, always dressed and acting as a man, another one of those epic spirits who represents the Himalayan way of things: unassuming, unapologetic, utterly tough.