Hello, Dali

We had had enough of buses for one day, so we jumped into a taxi and called our host at the hostel. She gave directions to the taxi driver. Twenty-five minutes later we pulled up to the Lily Pad Guest House. Our host, Erine, was waiting for us. She allowed us to check into our rooms even though it was only eight in the morning.

The inn was a beautiful, picturesque, three-story inn, with a brick courtyard overflowing with large potted plants. We had booked a family suite, but Erine put us into two separate rooms for the same price. The girls laid claim to the third-floor room that opened up directly onto the rooftop patio.

The city of Old Dali is . . . well, old with large portions of it looking pretty much the way they have for hundreds of years. Dali is nestled in between the Cangshan mountains to the west and the large Lake Erhai to the east. The land gently rises away from the lake for a mile or two making for gently sloping plains that have been rice farms for generations. As the land approaches the foot of the mountains, it begins to rise more steeply so that the whole city of Old Dali is built on a slope.

A large protective wall used to surround the city of Old Dali, but it is long since gone. Fortunately, four large, magnificent gates –one for each cardinal direction- and their arched entryways still remain.

The buildings in Old Dali are all variations on a theme. Almost all of them are built with grey brick columns at the corners and the walls in between are plastered over with an impossibly white stucco. Every building in Dali is roofed with dark grey, unglazed tiles and the corners of every roof make a last-second swosh heavenwards. Almost every building in Old Dali has narrow, hand-painted murals on the white walls just below the eaves. Some of the buildings also have large murals painted on one or more walls. The murals –painted in grey and blue-grey- invariably depicted pastoral scenes that try to capture the beauty of the rugged, but beautiful Yunnan regions.

All the windows in Dali are made from dark wood with intricate lattice in elaborate, recti-linear patterns. Many of the buildings have open store fronts at the street level but instead of having sliding or folding doors that closed off the opening afterhours, each store has eight or ten hand-crafted wooden panels that are set in place each evening. During the day, the panels are taken out and stacked against an exterior wall off to one side or just around the corner in an alley. Invariably, each of these door panels has beautiful carvings on them. Unlike the angular window lattice, the door carvings are all curves and swirls, plants and flowers and birds with long tail feathers. They’re stunning. I was amazed that a people –the majority of who still scratched out a living by farming- would put so much time and effort into adorning their buildings with such beautiful and time-consuming door panels. A person could easily spend an entire day strolling Old Dali and just photographing her doors.

While all of the buildings followed this basic design, no two were exactly the same. The result is that Old Dali possesses a charming sense of place. As you wander the wide boulevards of Old Dali, you most definitely know that you are not in Beijing or Shenzhen or Hong Kong.