Oddity 18 Small, lean horses are hard-working

Hardy mountain ponies have been used for centuries to transport goods through the mountainous Yunnan terrain. Most famously, bricks of Pu’er tea were carried in caravans on the Cha Ma Gu Dao (Ancient Tea Horse Trail) from the tea-producing areas of Simao and Xishuangbanna to the outside world: north-east to Beijing; north-west to Tibet; south to Laos and Thailand; southwest to Burma and India. These caravans of horses provided quite a stir in the southern countries, as the population there were more used to seeing oxen or elephants as beasts of burden. In fact this led to the Thais referring to the (mostly Muslim) Yunnanese as jiin haw, “Galloping Chinese”.