The stories told on the Tea Horse Road

The best thing about travel is that it can sometimes change your perspective in ways you never imagined.

I was trying to take a photograph of a Naxi woman, a member of one of the 26 ethnic minorities in Yunnan province. She was sitting with her daughter on a bench in Black Dragon Pool Park in Lijiang. In her Chairman Mao cap, carefully knotted apron and wrapped skirt she made an exotic subject and I had asked for permission to photograph her.

But as I stepped back to frame the shot, I sensed that one of the Chinese tourists was edging closer to me than was comfortable, and then saw that she wanted her companion to take a picture of herself beside me. To her, my blond hair and blue eyes were "exotic." Now I was the other, the curiosity, the one in the camera lens.

By the time my trip was finished, I had been photographed with strangers many times.

The juxtaposition was just one of the experiences in a tour through Yunnan province that challenged my view of China and myself. This large and layered country surprised me with its rugged beauty, the gentle politeness of its people and its long and complex history.

I was following one of the branches of the ancient Tea Horse Road.

It is a lesser-known trading route than the Silk Road but an equally important one, with this particular branch ranging from Yunnan province in the southwest of China and through the mountains to Lhasa in Tibet and beyond. Along this challenging route, from the sixth century to the 20th, traders trekked by foot and on horseback, taking the coveted pu-erh tea of Yunnan into Tibet to exchange for the hardy, short-legged ponies needed for their armies and their trading caravans.

The road led me through a China that is more than the Great Wall, pandas and terracotta warriors. This was the China whose ancient history and mountainous terrain inspired James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon and that many Western visitors have not yet discovered.

The original path has been replaced by modern roads but the journey along the old trading route still leads through ancient villages that were centres of commerce for the tea traders. It follows along the Yangtze River, through valleys and vertiginous mountains, and up to the border of Tibet.

I began in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province and a city of 4 1/2 million. It is the flower city of China – "In every bouquet in China, at least one of the flowers was grown in Kunming," my guide Mike told me.

I spent a drizzly afternoon in the Stone Forest outside the city, climbing through the towering limestone monoliths. The stone formations looked like petrified trees, eroded by wind and water, stretching into the far distance. Even in the chill, this Unesco World Heritage Site was awesome. Back in the city, I explored the Yunnan Provincial Museum, whose important collection documenting the history of the province is a good place to get some perspective on the many ethnic cultures that co-exist here.

By then I was tired and considering an early night, but Mike convinced me that dinner in Kunming would be special. I was skeptical as I followed his directions, trudging through a hotel lobby, then through the dining room of an uninspiring buffet restaurant, and then across a drafty walkway that led to an adjacent building. But, up a flight of stairs and through a small reception room, we entered the welcome comfort of a restaurant and an adventure in food history.

Consuming "crossing-the-bridge noodles" is a rite of passage if you visit Kunming. The dish is an area specialty, and one that comes with a story, as so many things in China seem to do. When a scholar withdrew across a bridge to a lonely island to live and study, so the tale goes, his wife would come each day with food for him. But as he found that his food was always cold, his appetite waned and he began to waste away. His clever wife came up with a solution – she cut all the ingredients for a meal into small slices, carried a hot bowl of boiling broth, and then put the ingredients and the noodles into the broth once she was on the island. The heat of the broth cooked the ingredients and the scholar regained his appetite and flourished in his studies, going on to become an important imperial scholar.

My modern Kunming version began with a large bowl of steaming broth and platters of artfully arranged ingredients – a quail's egg, shrimp, chicken, edible flowers, lemon grass, scallions and noodles. It was a memorable meal, satisfying both to the eye and the appetite.

The next morning I took the short flight to Lijiang, one of the old and well-preserved cities that was a trading stop for the Tea Horse Road, and found myself at an altitude of 2,500 metres (8,200 feet). Each leg of this journey would take me to a higher elevation.

In Lijiang, I met Anna (her Chinese name is Yangzhong, but it is common to adopt a Western name that is easier to pronounce). She is a Naxi ethnic woman, proud of her heritage and still closely connected to her village roots and family. "Naxi culture has traditionally been matriarchal," she explained. "Because traditionally the men would be away with the trading expeditions into Tibet for months at a time, women took over the work, especially the heavy work. They raised the children, ran the farms, did the finances, even became the butchers. The men studied music and literature, and taught the Naxi traditions to the children."

Naxi women had to be strong and earned a reputation for prodigious hard work. "To be considered an attractive Naxi woman, you needed to be very big and very dark-skinned – that was the measure of beauty."

Men shouldn't rush to move here, though. Times have changed. "It was a good place to be a man," she told me, "but the work is more equally divided today."

Yunnan means "south of the clouds" and the name seemed very apt when we travelled outside the city and climbed even higher, to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. At about a 5,000-metre elevation, a visit to the top can cause some dizziness, and many of the visitors around me were carrying portable oxygen bottles. Altitude sickness can be a problem for some in this mountainous part of China, but I had no trouble. It doesn't seem to be a function of fitness levels or age, but rather just that some people struggle with the altitude and some don't. But a climb to the top platform has its rewards – a vista of impressive snow-capped peaks and clouds that stretches far into the distance.

At the foot of the mountain, a purpose-built open-air theatre hosts a performance that celebrates the different ethnic groups of Yunnan. With more than 100 horses and 500 actors, the show is an impressive spectacle, designed by director Zhang Yimou, famous for such films as Raise the Red Lantern and his work on the closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. A pass to Snow Mountain can include both the gondola lift up the mountain and the show.

Later, we shared a traditional tea ceremony back in Lijiang where I learned about pu-erh tea and how the tea leaves were naturally fermented during the long journey through the mountains into Tibet. The elegant fermented teas of Yunnan, packaged in rounds or bricks, are now highly prized by tea aficionados.

That evening I wandered through the narrow cobbled streets and laneways of the old town of Lijiang, where mine was one of the few Caucasian faces. As darkness fell, the crowds increased, noise levels rose and the upper windows of the shops were opened to reveal musicians who would play to the wee hours. The food courts were sizzling, full of people pointing to dumplings, grilled octopus, spring rolls, bowls of noodles. Stall owners served up stir-fries with theatrical flair – another kind of performance. Shop after shop offered brilliantly coloured silk shawls, silver bracelets, mandalas and prayer beads.

Suddenly it was after midnight, and I had a moment of panic when I realized I was lost in the maze of little streets and couldn't remember the name of my hotel. The keycard displayed only the Chinese name, so I showed the card to an elderly gentleman in a shop. We had no language in common, but he understood, and put aside his work to escort me a few streets over to the Golden Path Hotel where I was booked. He gave me a graceful bow to say goodbye.

The next day, on the road from Lijiang to Shangri-la, we stopped in a small Yi village in the mountains. I met a local housewife who showed me how to make tsampa, with yak-butter tea, barley flour, yak cheese and sugar, mixed by hand into a ball. It was a staple portable food carried by shepherds into the high mountains and, with a cup of hot yak-butter tea, kept them fed and warm.

Further on, the Tea Road curved past Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the deepest gorges in the world, where several popular trekking paths through the mountains begin. A challenging series of stairs leads down to the river, and if you run out of steam for the return climb you can arrange to be carried up in a covered sedan chair by two men. We ate excellent Kung Pao chicken in a local café, beneath a poster of Mao Zedong, and then continued along the ancient way to the city of Shangri-la, located at an altitude of over 3,000 metres.

Originally named Zhongdian, the city changed its name, with calculated wisdom and an eye for tourism, for the purpose of linking the area to James Hilton and the utopian mountain village he created in Lost Horizon. There is some validity to the connection. Though the city does not have the isolated secrecy of its fictional namesake, and it won't keep you young forever, it was home to explorer and botanist Joseph Rock, whose articles on the area are thought to have been Hilton's inspiration.

Only when we visited the Buddhist lamasery of Songzanlin did Hilton's peaceful separation from the everyday world really come to life. Perched on a hillside above Lamuyangcuo Lake, the monastery is the largest in Yunnan province. I visited in the early morning, in time to watch the local faithful make their daily meditative circumnavigation of the monastery. The aromas of incense, the colours of Tibetan thangkas, the chants of monks, seemed to echo the fictional monastery in Lost Horizon's Valley of the Blue Moon.

On the last day in Shangri-la, we hiked along well-tended paths in nearby Pudacuo National Park, did tai chi with locals in the morning and danced with them in the square at dusk, and ate yak-meat hot pot in Shangri-la's old town, much of which has been carefully restored after a disastrous fire in 2014.

This was a busy journey, but it seemed to be merely preamble to the long story of the "Middle Kingdom." China made me feel naive, like the teenager who thinks she knows everything and then discovers that all she knows is a very small fragment of the large picture. I feel as though I brushed the thinnest surface of a civilization whose many layers are deep and complex and profound. It leaves a visitor wanting to know more – and that is the real blessing of travel, isn't it?

If you go

Domestic flights from many Chinese cities to Kunming are frequent and there are regular flights from Kunming to Lijiang and Shangri-la. China Eastern is one of the largest airlines that flies domestically and also has non-stop flights from Toronto to Shanghai.

Several tour companies offer Tea Road packages, probably the easiest way for a first-time visitor to explore the area.

Spring Tour, one of the largest tour companies in China (spring-tour.com), has a nine-day Yunnan Minority Culture Discovery tour, from $2,500 (U.S.) a person, including two domestic flights.

Wild China Tours (wildchina.com) offers a 10-day Ancient Tea and Horse Road Tour with Canadian explorer and tea expert Jeff Fuchs, from $7,237 (Canadian) a person. Fuchs was the first Westerner to walk the entire route.

According to Fuchs, "We follow as best we can the route north to the old market towns of Lijiang and Dali, continuing in our tea-soaked days to explore what is left of significant points along the route, as well as meeting, where we can, with a few of the last remaining individuals who travelled the route, or were affiliated with trade."