November 22 – December 5, 2026 · Year of the Horse

The Tea
Horse Road

Ivy Hermit  ·  Eastern Leaves
November 2026

A road that moved tea
across Central Asia for
a thousand years.

This journey is fourteen days, four provinces, and roughly three thousand kilometers of ground that has been moving tea for over a thousand years. We start in Chengdu and end in Yiwu — the same direction the original caravans traveled before anyone had a word for what they were building. Along the way, we visit the tea gardens, factories, and stone-paved market squares that still carry evidence of a trade that once connected southwest China to Tibet and Central Asia, and that shaped the character of Pu'er tea as we know it today.

We are making this trip with Eastern Leaves, a team that has been walking this road for years and knows the farmers, the villages, and the teas by name. This isn't a research trip for us — it is an invitation into work they have already done, which is a different kind of privilege. What we find together comes home with us, and Hermit Circle members hear about it before anyone else does.

We are not flying any of this. Every leg is by high-speed train or private car — not as a constraint, but because the landscape from the train window is part of the education. When you are moving through the same mountain passes the caravans used, you understand something about the tea that no tasting note can give you. The altitude changes, the light changes, and by the time you arrive somewhere, you have already been thinking about it for a few hours.

On the high-speed rail legs, we run a cold brew competition. The rules are simple: bring a cold brew bottle, choose a tea you think can hold up to three or four hours of cold steeping, and fill it when you board. By the time you pull into the next city — sometimes three hours away, sometimes closer to five — the tea has had time to become something, and so have you. There are no instructions on what to pick. Some people reach for an aged Pu'er because it opens slowly and rewards patience. Others go for a high-mountain oolong because they want something clear and cool against the landscape rolling past the window.

When we arrive at each stop, we compare notes — what you chose, what it became after four hours in a cold brew bottle on a moving train, and why you thought that was the right call. It is not really a competition. It is a reason to pay attention: to the light changing outside, to the color of your tea two hours in, to what the person next to you decided to bring and what that tells you about how they think. The train becomes the session. That is the kind of trip this is.

Solomon, founder of Ivy Hermit, departs from New York. If you would like to travel together from JFK or EWR, we can coordinate the flights and meet at the gate. Or make your own way to Chengdu and join us there — either way, we will be glad you came.

Dates November 22 – December 5, 2026
Duration 14 days · 13 nights
Route Chengdu → Yunnan → Xishuangbanna → Yiwu
Departing New York (JFK / EWR) — travel together or meet in Chengdu
Hosts Ivy Hermit & Eastern Leaves

A road older than the trade it carried.

The Tea Horse Road — 茶馬古道, Chama Gudao — was not a road in any modern sense. It was a network of mountain paths connecting the tea mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan to the high plateaus of Tibet and Central Asia, active from at least the Tang Dynasty (7th century) through to the 20th. For over a thousand years, compressed Pu'er cakes traveled one way, warhorses the other.

The trade was not incidental. Chinese dynasties could not field cavalry without Tibetan horses. Tibetan communities could not survive high-altitude winters without the nutrients in aged tea. What moved along this road wasn't a luxury — it was infrastructure. The Tea Horse Road built monasteries, cities, and cultures on both ends. Pu'er tea was compressed into cakes specifically because of this journey — dense enough to survive months on a yak's back at 4,000 metres.

Most of the road has been absorbed by paved highways. What remains — the stone-paved sections in Yiwu and Shaxi, the ancient trading posts, the farmers still pressing cakes by hand — is what we are going to see.

木馬年 · 2026

This year is the Year of the Horse.
We thought about that when we planned the route.

Two Routes · One Road The ancient Tea Horse Road and our 2026 journey, overlaid
The Tea Horse Road, c. 618–1950 CE
Our 2026 journey (train & car, no flights)
Both routes pass here
Before We Depart · New York October – November 2026

In the weeks before we leave, we gather in New York. Two seminars — the history of the road, the teas we'll encounter, the people we'll meet.

Session 01

The Road

A thousand years of Pu'er caravans, mountain passes, and the trade that connected Southwest China to Tibet and Central Asia. Why this route existed, what it moved, and what remains of it. The historical context behind every stop we'll make.

New York · Date TBA
Session 02

The Teas

Aged sheng, Tibetan dark tea, rock oolong, ancient-tree Pu'er. What each one is, how it was made, and what to look for when you're tasting in the field. You don't need to have drunk these before — you need to understand what you're drinking before you arrive.

New York · Date TBA
Day by Day Nov 22 – Dec 5

Chengdu

Days 1–5  ·  Nov 22–26
Day 1 Nov 22

Arrival

Transfers and check-in. Sichuan cuisine for lunch — the real kind, not the version calibrated for visitors. A welcome tea session in a traditional Chengdu teahouse in the afternoon, which is the right way to let a new city settle around you before you start asking questions of it.

Day 2 Nov 23

People's Park

Bamboo-shaded teahouses in the morning. No agenda — the kind of sitting that most cities have forgotten how to allow. The Panda Base in the afternoon.

Day 3 Nov 24

Ya'an · Mengding Mountain

Drive from Chengdu into the foothills of Sichuan, where the altitude starts to matter. Mengding Mountain is often cited as the world's first deliberately cultivated tea garden — there are records going back to the Han Dynasty, which means these gardens have been producing tea for roughly two thousand years before anyone thought to document them. The mother trees are still there, still producing, unbothered by their own history. We spend a few hours with them. It is a good way to recalibrate your sense of scale.

Day 4 Nov 25

Yingjing

The Tea Horse Road Museum. Then a private tasting with a long-time collector — seventy years of archived, sealed teas, opened carefully. Tibetan dark tea in the afternoon. A tour of a black pottery workshop before dinner.

Day 5 Nov 26

Return to Chengdu

The descent from foothills to plains. A slower pace. Afternoon at Wuhou Temple — a Three Kingdoms shrine that rewards the unhurried — or Mount Emei, a sacred Buddhist peak. You choose.

Kunming & Dali

Days 6–8  ·  Nov 27–29
Day 6 Nov 27

Kunming

High-speed train from Chengdu. Afternoon in the Green Lake neighborhood — the kind of tea culture that doesn't perform itself. An easy first evening in Yunnan.

Day 7 Nov 28

Kunming · Dali

Morning at an incense school: agarwood collection, theory, and blending. A discipline that shares more with tea than it might seem. Then west — private car to Dali's old town. Erhai Lake by evening.

Day 8 Nov 29

Dali · Shaxi

Dali's courtyards and lanes in the morning. Then south to Shaxi — a trading post on the original Tea Horse Road, still intact. The 700-year-old Ancient Theatre. Xingjiao Temple. Yujin Bridge. Tea in Bai architecture that hasn't decided it needs to update.

Xishuangbanna

Days 9–14  ·  Nov 30 – Dec 5
Day 9 Nov 30

Shaxi → Kunming → Pu'er → Xishuangbanna

A long day by rail — intentionally so. We don't fly this leg. The train south from Kunming runs through Pu'er on the Yunnan-Laos Railway, the same corridor the ancient caravans used to bring tea north. Every kilometer of it matters. Welcome lunch on arrival, with ancient-tree Pu'er alongside Eastern Leaves' own harvest — the first real comparison of the journey.

Day 10 Dec 1

Nannuo Mountain

A walk to the 800-year-old tree considered king of the mountain. Hani culture lunch with locally grown ingredients. Gongfucha technique in the afternoon — unhurried, in the right setting for once.

Day 11 Dec 2

Menghai

A traditional tea workshop, the kind that has been running the same way for longer than the brand. Stone-mill cake pressing by hand. A dedicated Pu'er tasting in the afternoon — production understood from the inside.

Day 12 Dec 3

Yiwu Mountain

Travel to Yiwu Old Street — historically regarded as the starting point of the Tea Horse Road. Historically significant homes, a trading square, a local museum. Then the original stone road through the forest, on foot.

Day 13 Dec 4

Luoshuidong · Mahei

A morning tea session with the Yiwu peaks behind it. Two villages: Luoshuidong, with ancient trees and original stone road, then Mahei — a Han-culture village that has been here longer than the road has a name.

Day 14 Dec 5

Farewell · Xishuangbanna

A final session with the best teas of the journey — whatever that ended up meaning, for each person in the room. Gonguan prepared on fire, the way it was meant to be. By this point we have been drinking tea together for two weeks, which is long enough for something real to have happened. Everything that gets said, gets said here. Then we part — transfers to airport or train on your own schedule, carrying whatever you decided to bring home.

What's Included
  • All accommodation — including a private villa in Xishuangbanna, steps from the forest
  • All internal transport — high-speed trains and private cars throughout. No flights. Every kilometer traveled on the ground.
  • All meals, with regional cuisine throughout
  • All tea tastings, workshops, and cultural sessions
  • Guided experience with farmers and tea scholars on the ground
  • The company of people who have been doing this for a long time
Not Included
  • International flights to and from China — we depart from New York and can help coordinate travel arrangements if needed
  • Visas
  • Travel insurance

Dining
  • Regional Chinese cuisine throughout, with emphasis on local specialties
  • Vegetarian and vegan options available at every meal
  • Special dietary arrangements can be made with advance notice
Solomon Chan, Ivy Hermit founder, Yunnan
Co-hosted with Eastern Leaves

This road is theirs.
We are accompanying.

We met the Eastern Leaves team the way most meaningful things happen — through a shared obsession with tea and a growing frustration with how little of what gets written about it actually captures what makes it worth drinking. They have been walking this road for years. They know which villages still have stone-milled Pu'er pressed by hand, which farmers will open the really old cakes for the right conversation, and which sections of the original stone path are worth walking on foot even in November cold. We could not have built this trip without them, and we are not pretending otherwise.

What this means for you is simple: you are not joining a tour. You are joining two teams who have staked their names on knowing what they're talking about, going somewhere they genuinely love, with people who are serious about learning. If that is the kind of trip you want to take, this is it.

Read about the journey from Eastern Leaves →
Space is limited

To join, write to us.

We are not running a waitlist or a countdown timer. If you have read this far and something in it is pulling at you, that is the right instinct — reach out and we will have an honest conversation about what the trip is, what it costs, who is coming, and whether it is the right fit for you. There are a small number of spots, and the people who belong here tend to find their way. We will not pressure you. This is a real invitation, not a sales funnel.

solomon@ivyhermit.com