Tucked at the end of Tiao Shui Alley near the Jiuding Dragon Pond in Shuhe Old Town, a 280-year-old wooden courtyard holds the quiet weight of the Ancient Tea Horse Road. Built around 1735 by Wang Jian, a caravan leader crowned the "Tea Horse King," this 620-square-meter Naxi residence took six years to complete. Today, it survives as a rare architectural fossil, shielded from commercial developers by Wang Shitang, his fifth-generation descendant.

The entrance is marked by traditional Naxi six-panel doors flanked by couplets written in ancient Dongba script. Inside, the air carries the sharp, earthy scent of raw lacquer. Every spring, Wang Shitang spends thousands to coat the two-story wooden structure, a meticulous ritual to protect the overlapping dougong brackets and flying eaves from rot. He enforces a strict ban on smoking and photography, once shouting down careless tourists to defend the vulnerable timber.

The courtyard blooms with plum blossoms, osmanthus, and orchids, framing a space where history feels immediate. Inside the main hall, a Ming Dynasty scroll chair and a heavy Qing Dynasty stone roller anchor the room. The caravan leader’s bedroom merges Naxi and Tibetan aesthetics, reflecting a life spent crossing cultural borders. The walls display worn leather saddles, iron stirrups, and hunting rifles—tools of survival from a brutal trade route.

Perhaps the most intimate artifacts are the twenty weathered letters recovered by Wang’s father. Penned by ancestors during brief rests in freezing mountain gorges, the faded ink preserves their longing for this exact courtyard. These papers transform the mythic horse traders into exhausted men dreaming of home.

Wang Shitang rejected lucrative offers—including half a million in cash—to turn his ancestral home into a boutique inn. He chose to open the Chamawang Former Residence Memorial Hall to the public for free. In the first-floor reception room, he pours cups of raw Pu'er tea for visitors. The bitter, complex flavor of the tea mirrors the history of the Wang family, offering a lingering taste of a vanished era.