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Coming down from the northern hills we reach the fertile alluvial plain around Erhei Lake where the Bai nationality has been established for over three thousand years.
This is Dali's South Gate.
Dali was one of the six small Dai kingdoms that merged to form of the powerful Nanzhao kingdom that enjoyed hegemony over northern Yunnan and Myanmar and controled the east-west trade route to India from the 8th to the 13th centuries.
A short distance north of the South Gate on Fuxing Lu is this imposing structure that probably served as a bell or a drum tower in the past. Fuxing Lu is Dali's main north-south street where the museum and the better shops are.
This pavilion is an example of typical Bai architecture. It might have been a home once but now it houses a bank if I recall correctly.
Dali is very touristic, even more so than Lijiang. This street, Huguo Lu, is commonly known as the strangers' street to because that's where most of the tourist restaurants, guest houses and shops are concentrated.
As I was passing a Chinese pharmacy on Fuxing Lu one day, I spotted this Chinese doctor completely absorbed in taking his patient's pulse and snapped this picture from a distance.
I travel with a very small Olympus Epic 35mm camera whose lens has a relatively short 35mm focal length and a 1:2.8 aperture. It weighs only 150 grams so I carry it in my pocket at all times. I don't need a zoom because I can scan small portions of my photos at a high 1200 dpi resolution which allows me to blow them up by as much as a linear factor of 16 to get the 450X300 pixel jpeg format I use. This photo was blown up this way by a linear factor of about 3, that is, about nine times surface wise.
Below on the left a shot of an artist practicing his craft in the hall of the Jinhua hotel where I had a 4 bed dorm all to myself for only three dollars. On the right, a Hui butcher carving the meat off a beef spine in a shop on Fuxing Lu. I am still always a bit astonished to see people buy meat without distinguishing the part of the animal it came from, of course, all at the same price.
Here are the three famous Dali pagodas, the big one with 16 tiers is 70 meters high and was built in the middle of the 9th century and the two smaller ones were built two centuries later. This view is looking west towards Lanfeng peak.
Immediately west of the three pagodas, stands this large Bell Tower that is the entrance to the Chongsheng Temple.
This harmonious view of the three pagodas was taken looking east towards the lake from the Bell Tower.
The Chongsheng Temple has now been converted into a museum about the history, construction and restoration of the pagodas.
There were half a dozen lovely Dai girl attendants like these making sure that the visitors had everything they needed.
Back in Dali I took the chair lift to the temple and lookout on Zonghe Peak to get an overall view of the city and lake.
Here is the entrance to Zhonghe Temple.
And this is Zonghe Temple, that was hidden behind its entrance in the previous photo.
Erhei Lake and the square layout of the original fortified city of Dali are clearly visible in this view taken from the temple.
