Their food consists of meat, chiefly pork, turnips, rice, barley-meal and tea made from the brick-tea of China.
The bulk of the leaf tea, however, now goes to Russia by direct steamers to Odessa instead of to London as formerly, and a large quantity goes overland via Tientsin and Siberia in the form of brick tea.
The quantity of brick tea thus exported in 1904 was upwards of 10 million lb.
One of the most universal articles of consumption in Tibet is the Chinese brick-tea, which even passes as currency.
Efforts have been made by the planters of the Duars to prepare Indian brick-tea for the Tibetan market, which is calculated to consume some 11,000,000 lb yearly.
