Note 1206 — Chapter XV · —Mountain Barriers And Their Passes

The retarded mountain peoples on the borders of the Central Asia plateau employ the same primitive means of transportation. The roads leading from the Sze Chuan province of western China over the mountain ranges to Tibet are traversed by long lines of porters, men, women and children, laden with bales of brick tea,1206 the strongest of them shouldering 350 pounds. The Bhutia coolies of Sikkim act as carriers on military and commercial expeditions on the track across the Himalayas between Darjeeling and Shigatze. Colonel Younghusband found that these Bhutias, who were paid by the job, would carry a pack of 250 to 300 pounds, or three times the usual burden of a Central Asia carrier. Landon cites the case of a Bhutia lady who was said to have carried a piano on her head from the plains up to Darjeeling (7150 feet).1207 In Nepal, women and girls, less often men, have long been accustomed to carry travellers and merchandise over the Himalayan ranges.1208 In the marginal valleys of the Himalayas, like Kashmir and Baltistan, the natives are regularly impressed for begar or carrier service on the English military roads to strategic points on the high mountain frontier of the Indian Empire.1209 So the Igorots of the Luzon province of Benguet pack all goods and supplies from Naguilian in the lowlands up 4000 feet in a distance of 25 miles to their little capital of Baguio; for this service they are now paid one peso (46 cents in 1901) a day with food, or ten times as much as under the Spanish rule.1210