Dali Dairy Diaries
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 Sitting on some very lucrative trade routes, Dali was the capital of the Nanzhao kingdom, a state that successfully repealed several Chinese invasions, resisted Tibetan expansion, and waged wars of its own in modern day Vietnam and Myanmar.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...