Pu'er Tea Horse Road Relic Park: New life for an ancient trail

In Pu'er, a city in southwest China's Yunnan Province, the Ancient Tea Horse Road Relic Park is giving new life to a thousand-year-old historic route. While protecting the ancient relics, the park combines culture and tourism, turning the once-quiet trail into a lively destination.

For more than 1,000 years, the Tea Horse Road was a busy path for caravans. Traders would exchange tea for horses here, making it an important commercial corridor in southwest China. Today, the sounds of the caravan bells are gone but the road is being reborn as a popular spot for slow travel and cultural exploration.

The park takes advantage of its well-preserved ancient road sites and long history of tea-horse trade. It has restored several tea culture exhibition halls that represent the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. These include buildings like the Tang Tea Palace and Song Tea Pavilion, which show how tea was made and how tea etiquette changed over time.

The scenic area also has many unique attractions. There is Dingbo Lake, the Rainbow Cableway and the Caravan Museum. The cableway, which is 5,174 meters long, lets visitors enjoy a bird's-eye view of the primeval forest and the entire ancient road.

As a national key cultural relic protection unit, the park offers activities like hiking along the ancient road and tea-making experiences, showing the achievements of ancient commercial civilization and ecological protection. The Zhongyi Station Museum displays more than 300 cultural relics, such as horse saddles and horse lamps. Through a blend of real objects and digital technology, it brings ancient commercial scenes back to life.

Almost every day, the "Caravan Love Song" water show is held by Dingbo Lake. Using sound and light technology, the show tells the legends of the ancient Tea Horse Road in an exciting way.