<正> A small passage cutting through Hendu-an Mountains and the Himalayas in southwest China has been bustling with shuttling traders driving caravans of fully loaded beasts of burden for a millennium. Unlike the Silk Route that is known to all in the world, this route hidden away in high mountains and skirted by flowing streams is almost unknown to the outside world. Such a situation lasted until the 1990s when a number of young scholars surveyed its darkened byways and named it the Tea-Horse