Son of horseman Gang

To find the name for horseman gang has troubled me a lot specifically because I cannot find a proper translation in proper documents. Many called them caravan but I still prefer my own version.

In Chinese “馬幫” is referred to in this great western region for people who lives on horses – themselves and to provide service of transportation to commodity traders, mostly tea.  They are the indispensible part of the tea-horse trade, and where they worked mostly, known as Tea Horse Road – ancient tea route.

It all began in the Upper Cretaceous when the Indo-Australian Plate and Eurasia Plate collided, formed the high region known the Himalayan and the Tibetan Plateau known as roof of the world today. The rise of land made ancient and even today’s transportation difficult, so the need of a type of transport to be able to traverse along the mountain and valley, dense forest, medium high altitude became a necessity – made happen the horseman gang, and that must be among the most ancient professions existed and in effective today, although less significant, but the way the worked, live is still very much the same.

I shot this image during the hike on the hill overlooking Muge Cuo, a Tibetan boy of the horseman gang family.  I have no idea how many generations his family has served in this part of the world, and no idea how he can receive education and so on, and so on.