The sun has just risen to reveal the distant peaks of the Knuckle Mountain Range, Sri Lanka.
Men and women file out of a tumbledown Hindu temple nestled on a quiet hillside. They tread along stony paths in flip-flops or bare feet up into the slopes above. Once they reach the elevated tea fields the temple goers fan out: the men clutching curved kokaththa knives go one way, to manage plant overgrowth; the women head for the harvest-ready plants with long leaf-picking sticks.
Under a high-altitude sun and immersed in the bucolic landscape, tea cultivators toil into the mid-afternoon breaking only for intermittent rain showers.
Surrounded by bloodthirsty leeches and poisonous snakes, hand tea cultivation is bruising work that demands painstaking attention; pickers choose only the greenest leaves from each bud by hand, and trimmers maintain all plants level by eye.
Finally, once the minimum tealeaf quotas are met, the women carry the day’s pickings, collected in large sacks, back down the hillside to be weighed before they are transported to a nearby processing factory up at the top of the valley. An average 18-kilo haul brings in around 380 rupees ($3).
This laborious daily ritual has hardly changed for Sri Lanka’s upcountry Tamils since their ancestors were brought over by the British from Southern India to work on the Sinhalese-majority island’s tea and coffee plantations in the 19th century.
· A tea plant takes at least three years to produce leaves. You can't rush a good thing: slower growing plants produce tea with more body and flavor. Plants are often grown at higher elevations to slow growth.
· The smaller a tea leaf, the more expensive the tea. Workers are typically paid by the kilogram for bags of tea leaves, so they must pick many more leaves for the same payout.
As recently as the first decades of the 20th century, much of the tea transported by the
ancient Tea-Horse Road was carried not by mule caravan, but by human porters, giving real substance to the once widely-employed designation ‘coolie’, a term thought to have been derived from the Chinese kuli or ‘bitter labour’.
This was particularly true of smaller tracks and trails leading from remote tea-picking areas to the arterial Tea-Horse routes, both in Yunnan and in Sichuan.
Perhaps because this human portage played a less economically significant role than the large – sometimes huge – yak, pony and mule caravans, and perhaps because there is little or no romance attached to the piteous sight of over-burdened, inadequately-clad and under-nourished porters hauling themselves and their massive loads across muddy valleys and freezing mountain passes, less information is available to us concerning tea porters than about tea caravans.
According to 81-year-old former tea porter Li Zhongquan, tea was carried by human portage all the way from Tianquan County to Kangding, a distance of 180km (112 miles) each way on narrow mountain tracks, much of the way at dangerously high altitudes in freezing temperatures.
An able-bodied porter would carry 10 to 12 packs of tea, each weighing between 6 and 9 kg. To this had to be added 7 to 8 kg of grain for sustenance en route, as well as ‘five or six pairs of homemade straw sandals to change on the way’.
The strongest porters could carry 15 packs of tea, making a total load of around 150 kg (330 imperial pounds). ‘The grain lasted no longer than half the journey’, Li remembered, ‘and you had to replenish your food supply at your own expense’. As for the multiple pairs of straw sandals: ‘these would be worn out quickly, as the mountain path was extremely rough’.
To make the portage of such heavy loads possible, and to help guard against the ever-present danger of overbalancing and falling into one of the many deep ravines skirted by the narrow mountain trail, tea porters carried iron-tipped T-shaped walking sticks both to assist in struggling over the steep, rocky path, and to rest the load on, without taking it off their backs, when they paused for breath.
A surviving section of the old stone path near Ganxipo Village bears testament to the almost unimaginable difficulties faced by the tea porters in the past; small holes dot the stone slabs of the path at regular intervals of a pace or so, indicating where, over centuries and perhaps even millennia, the porters struck the rock with their iron-tipped sticks as they made their laborious way to and from Kangding.
