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87 C H A P T E R 4 Fire and Fury The walled prefectural city of Dali, in western Yunnan Province, rests in a valley, strategically equidistant from mountains and water. Like Taidong, it sits on an active fault zone. Like Taidong, a massive, sheer mountain barrier rises up from the valley, and lower, but equally rugged , peaks protect and isolate it on the north and south. Lying to the east, again coincidentally like Taidong, is a large body of deep water.1 In Dali, that water is the Erhai—literally “ear-shaped sea”—which covers most of the valley floor. East of the lake stretches not the empty vastness of open ocean but an arid expanse of dusty, red limestone hills. To the west, dominating the landscape at every turn, the massive Cangshan Mountains rise up to form a steep, continuous barrier for more than thirty miles. From the base of the mountains a long, narrow plain, crosscut by a series of fast-moving mountain streams, extends down to the edge of the lake. This plain is a densely settled patchwork of rice paddies and cornfields, lakeside hamlets, hilltop villages, and market towns. To the south, the lake becomes a narrow river and turns west, flowing through a narrow gap in the mountains toward the Mekong. Guarding the southern entrance to the basin is the sprawling city of Xiaguan (lit. lower outpost), which in recent decades has replaced the old walled town as the area’s commercial and administrative center. Though remote from the perspective of the Chinese imperium, the Erhai Basin was for centuries an important hub of cultural, political , and commercial activity. From ca. 750 CE until the Mongol victory of 1254, the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms successively held sway over much of what is now Yunnan Province.2 Dali’s strategic advantage lay not only in its nearly impenetrable mountain fastness; it was also the junction of four major trade routes that comprised what has been called the “Southern Silk Road” (see Yang 2004).3 Today the majority of the prefecture’s rural population are ethnic Bai, one of the PRC’s fifty-six recognized “ethnic minorities.”4 Linguistic evidence generally supports the Bai claim that their ancestors 88 gods, ghosts, and gangsters settled in the region more than two thousand years ago; their association with the founding of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms is less certain, but they were certainly part of the ethnic confederation that made up both states. Throughout their history, however, the Bai have not been alone in the Erhai region: close to half a million Yi populate the upland areas, and Chinese speakers, both Han and Muslim Hui, dominate the urban districts. Hui villages are also clustered along the old highway, which winds across the mountains to Burma, less than one hundred miles to the west. On top of the geographical distance, political division, and divergent historical experience of the people, my research in Dali differs from my Taidong work in one very important respect. Taidong and Dali are both multiethnic regions that were until recently the domain of non-Chinese peoples, now politically and economically dominated by the Chinese state and increasingly marginalized in their own land by a growing Han majority. But in Taidong, my research focused almost exclusively on the Han; in Dali, I worked in ethnic Bai villages and towns. Yet despite the differences, I found that the communities I studied in Taidong and Dali shared basic forms of family and community organization that are, at some level, common throughout the historically Chinese-speaking regions. Religion in Dali is in many ways significantly different from what I had known in Taiwan; yet my Taiwan experience made it possible to comprehend and to talk with local residents about Bai religion. Mainstream Chinese culture began infiltrating Dali no later than the tenth century and accelerated considerably during the Ming and Qing periods.5 Moreover, in recent decades the Bai have increasingly pointed to their “Chineseness” to contrast themselves favorably with both the Muslim Hui and the highland Yi, whom they consider less “civilized” (that is, sinified). Just as important, the Bai long ago adopted Chinese rationales and representational forms to theorize their own patrilineal family system. Indeed most religious practice and belief among the Bai seems at most a variation on ubiquitous Han themes: images of deities arrayed hierarchically in village temples; offerings of food, incense, and spirit money and the burning of written petitions; Daoist priests and...

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