Dali in 1995: A personal 'Heaven on Earth'

Apart from Huguo and Fuxing Lu, most alleys within the older town showed little influence of tourist development in the mid-1990s . Occasionally I would come upon a quiet café, but mostly the scene was of local shops, little outdoor markets and quiet courtyards where families were producing the famed indigo-dyed batik cloth by a process known as tie-dying, displaying the resulting tablecloths, handkerchiefs and clothes.

It was along such lanes that I reached the Three Pagodas of Dali. For over 1,800 years they have stood as eyewitnesses to history and what stories the walls and alleys of Dali must have, if only stones could talk! Often I walked passed those iconic structures as I headed up into the countryside. Timeless agricultural villages gathered beside farming terraces, essential as the land sloped too steeply for normal arable farming. Soon human presence diminished and I would be alone in a seminatural environment of tall bushes, where in late autumn tree foliage transformed into a seasonal golden orange. Giant granite boulders lay strewn across deep valleys, washed down by historic storms or glacial activity from higher mountain slopes. The granite stone from Cangshan was widely used for street paving and building construction. Marble from the mountain is cut delicately into stoneware that Dali, whose name means “big marble”, remains famous for.

The mountain’s slopes can be accessed by walking up numerous paths or by chairlift. The latter takes visitors to Zhonghe Temple, where a trail, the “Cloud Traveler’s Path”, contours at 2,500 meters around Cangshan’s eastern slope, providing stunning views across the lake to islands and the hills rising above Erhai’s eastern shores.