POSTCARD FROM DALI
Once and future city
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Dali is drenched in history and filled with expressways.
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Photo: Pallavi Aiyar
Ethnic splendour on display: Bai women in Dali.
WE arrive in Dali after dark, eyes smarting and head dulled by the long bus journey from Kunming. But, within a few minutes, the mountain-fresh air sweeps away the dullness. This is a city saturated in history; a city at the crossroads of cultures and trade. As the capital of the Nanzhou Kingdom some 1,000 years ago, Dali was the fulcrum of exchanges between southwest China, Tibet and India. The Tea-Horse Caravan Road or Chamadao ran through Dali, making it a conduit for ideas and goods long before "globalisation" became a catchphrase. As I stroll along the narrow, flagstone streets, I sense the ghosts of caravans past, laden with fragrant tea and shimmering brocade; of strutting stallions, proud war horses from Tibet on their way to the Chinese capital; and of stern-faced monks, feet caked with the calluses borne of the long journey, across many mountains, from India.
Here and now
Then it's back to the neon-lit reality of modern-day Dali, a magnet for tourists from across China and backpackers from across the world. The ghosts of caravans and horses dissipate in the face of an aural assault of rock music from cafés with names like "Bad Monkey", mingling with the aggressive shouts of hawkers selling identical bric-a-brac. Dali has become the victim of its own success, the double edged boon-bane of tourism bringing prosperity and ruin, depending on which way you look at it.
The inhabitants of the historic old town are being pressured by the Yunnan provincial authorities to move out of their homes into modern apartments in a new city to the south, to make way for more shops and hotels in the old, picturesque part of town. In the meantime a brand new, "old city" is also under construction featuring cobblestone alleyways and replicas of traditional houses with blue-tiled roofs and high stonewalls. Authenticity seems to hold little meaning for the area's tourism officials. I ponder a world in which copies can increasingly be made "better" than the original, featuring the charm but without the smelly drains; a world where new and old can be used interchangeably, the line dividing them fuzzier all the time.
The city walls are decorated in fairy lights, a touch of kitsch but pretty nonetheless. Within the walled city, Dali's ethnic minorities are in full Disneyesque display. They pose for photographs in towering multi-hued head wraps and seem frozen in perpetual performances of "traditional" song and dance. Given its location and history, Dali is unsurprisingly a melting pot of ethnicities and cultures. Thirteen ethnic groups, including Hui Muslims and matriarchal Naxi peoples, call the prefecture home, but Dali's most populous minority group is the Bai. Today, little separates the Bai from the majority Han population in China apart from a penchant for eating raw pig.
I pass on the uncooked pig and try instead other local specialities like fatty (cooked) pork in plum sauce and fried goat's milk cheese. Best of all is the escape from Nescafe that Dali provides. Yunnan is China's main coffee-growing province and the only part of the country where real coffee is the norm. Sipping a freshly-brewed cup, next to a wood burning fireplace, looking out onto views of the craggy Cangshan Mountains, I savour a moment of serenity.
We are in Dali for the wedding of friends. The groom, an English accountant and the bride, a former advertising executive from Austria with a passion for tango, first met at my wedding in Delhi almost two years ago. We take a boat out to an island on Erhai Lake, a sparkling expanse of water to Dali's east. The 50-odd wedding guests assemble on the beach while a Living Buddha blesses the couple. It's a simple, short ceremony and afterwards we shower the newlyweds with fragrant flowers. Lunch is local peasant fare: taro, fish soup and fresh greens. Later, our motley collection of Jews, Hindus, Daoists and Catholics dance away the afternoon to the tunes of Argentinean tango and Brazilian samba. In our own way, we add another chapter to Dali's multicultural history.
Continuing links
The historic South Asian dimension of this history, forged through bonds of trade and Buddhism, now has a modern avatar in the form of dozens of Indian medical students, studying for an MBBS degree at the local university. For aspiring Indian doctors unable to either find or afford a place at medical colleges back home, Chinese universities like Dali's with their relatively lax entrance requirements and inexpensive tuition fees, are becoming an attractive destination. I am however, unable to talk with any of these made-in-China, Indian doctors. The local guide tells us that they almost never venture out of the university grounds and that it's too late in the evening for me to visit them on campus
Our Lonely Planet guide talks of a gruelling eleven-hour drive needed to cover the 400-kilometre distance from Dali to Kunming, the provincial capital. It's a 2000 edition and only seven years on, a spanking new expressway cuts the journey time to less than five hours. Fifty million tourists visited Yunnan province in 2005, and the authorities have done an impressive job putting together the infrastructure to support the burgeoning numbers of visitors. But, as we approach Kunming, the air turns to smoke and factory chimneys begin to dominate the skyline. Gloomily, I think ahead to Beijing's pollution choked skies and in my mind desperately try and hold on to the scented breeze of Dali.
PALLAVI AIYAR
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