My Travel Adventures

The second day in Dali was just as rainy as the first, but this did not stop a full program of events. While most people were making traditional Baizu tie-dye cloths, a smaller group of us toured three temples in the town of Xizhou – a Taoist temple, a Buddhist temple, and a Benzhu temple (that is, a temple to the deities worshipped by the Bai people). Seeing statues of the Jade Emperor, the Bodhisattva Guanyin, and gods with various animal paraphernalia brought back many memories of reading the Journey to the West. One of the interesting things I learned about the local religion is that the Bai people regard Kublai Khan as a deity for sparing the local populace of the Mongols’ usual massacres.

I spent very little time in class before it was time to pack up and start travelling again: CET’s midterm trip to Dali, a city about six hours away from Kunming. Sitting on some very lucrative trade routes, Dali was the capital of the Nanzhao kingdom, a state that successfully repealed several Chinese invasions, resisted Tibetan expansion, and waged wars of its own in modern day Vietnam and Myanmar. After its golden age in the eighth and ninth centuries, Nanzhao fell to dynastic squabbles that led to the establishment of the Dali Kingdom, a somewhat less powerful state that fell to Kublai Khan in 1253. The indomitable spirit of the Yunnanese, however, was not extinguished. During the Panthay Rebellion of 1856-1873, Dali was the capital of a sultanate that for a long time held its own against the Manchu government. Like Nanzhao, it too was defeated, but not until a protracted bloody war that cost perhaps a million lives. (Much of this information comes from websites not blocked by the C...