News Archive

By Lindy Brophy

A fascination with China and tea has led Gary Sigley to open the eyes of 80 teenagers in Perth and China to the rich culture of the Ancient Tea Horse Road.

The Tea Horse Road is a network of trading routes that was used, from the time of the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD), to transport tea from the tea-growing regions of Yunnan and Sichuan to the rest of the country including Tibet. Some of the tea also made its way into mainland Southeast Asia and India.

“People, goods and ideas have been travelling through this south-west region of China for thousands of years,” said Professor Sigley, from Asian Studies.

“My research concentrates on Yunnan Province, a tea-growing region, but also one of the most physically, botanically, zoologically, ethnically and culturally diverse regions in China, or indeed, the world.”

Professor Sigley has been visiting Yunnan and studying the heritage and history for many years. With the help of an Australia- China Council grant, he has run an online project for about 40 high school students studying Chinese in Perth and the same number of students in Yunnan.

“I wanted the students in Perth to know about a China beyond Shanghai and Beijing, to learn about the complexity of cultural heritage preservation in a regional and culturally diverse part of China,” he said. “And the project was also designed to impress upon the students in China the importance of their heritage by showing them that there are people outside China who are interested. I hope it has motivated them to become future custodians of their cultural heritage.

“It was also good for the students in Yunnan to have this opportunity to connect with students in Australia. Usually these sorts of opportunities are only available for students in the big cities.”

Students from Christ Church Grammar School (CCGS) and Mount Lawley Senior High School produced video blogs about themselves: their schools, families, food, community and other aspects of their lives. They used their Chinese language skills to write about themselves, communicating a different way to life to students in Yunnan.

Those students, from two different schools, did the same for the Perth students, some of them using a little English language as well.

They were then encouraged to leave comments for each other and interact via a dedicated website.

In June, Professor Sigley visited Yunnan again, producing video blogs for the website on different aspects of the Tea Horse Road.

The network of roads was once known as the Southern Silk Road, but more recently (since about 1990) it has been known as the Ancient Tea Horse Road to preserve the identity of the people of Yunnan and the important role they played in linking China with Tibet, India and mainland Southeast Asia.

“Salt, silk, precious stones and medicinal products were also transported on the Tea Horse Road but tea was the main cargo of the mule and horse caravans that would make their way from market to market along the route to Lhasa, a journey which took six months one-way,” Professor Sigley said.

“The route was divided into stages with different ethnic groups transporting the tea in their regions. Yunnan Province is home to 26 ethnic nationalities. Its population of 45 million live among mountain ranges and ‘basins’ or plateaus which support flora and fauna alpine meadows. Yunnan’s rich biodiversity is recognised with several biodiversity hotspots.”

Some of the original paths, particularly in the mountains, still exist, and there are some well-preserved staging post villages and caravan inns.

It is believed that Yunnan was the birthplace of tea as a drink. Its most famous tea is Puer, a broad leaf variety of Camellia senisis, grown in plantations (as hedges) and as natural tea trees, the oldest of which is about 800 years and has become a tourist attraction.

The CCGS students’ Chinese language teacher is Phillipa Nock, a former student of Professor Sigley’s. She said having an authentic audience for their language skills meant the boys worked hard to create some excellent work. “We’re always looking for real opportunities for our students to use the language they have learned and this provided a great way to achieve this,” Ms Nock said.

Some of the students are planning to visit Yunnan Province next year.

Professor Sigley has won an Endeavour Fellowship to visit Yunnan University’s Ancient Tea Horse Road Cultural Research Centre for six months. He leaves later this month.

Published in UWA News , 17 September 2012