Red mountain berries

Food for sale

        We stopped outside of Yunnanyi to look at a tobacco field.  The government owns the land, the farmer buys the seed and grows the tobacco and dries the leaves by hanging them in towers with an oven at the base.  They are contracted to sell so much to a cigarette company and pay a tax on the profit to the government.  Tobacco grows well here and the Chinese are still smokers.

Tobacco field

Preparing our lunch - it was good!

        We ate lunch at a converted tea-horse roadhouse on the Old Burma Road. There are only about 100 yards of the Old Burma Road remaining.  The road was built using huge man powered rollers to crush in rocks to make a flat surface.

Burma Road

Stone rollers used to roll out the crushed rock surface of the road

        In Yunnanyi we walked through the town gate and along a street with a solid row of wooden houses.  On the entry doors were pictures of the fabled warlords who were keeping out ghosts.  We looked at a Confucian Temple and then entered the village school grounds. 

Yunnanyi street scene

Door with picture of warlord who is protecting the house

Woman weaving baskets

House with TV

Brooms used for sweeping the school yard

Ping pong table with a creative net - bricks

            The next stop was the Yunnan Horse Caravan Culture Museum, which was once a hotel for the travelers, merchants, and traders going through Yunnan on the way to Dali, Lhasa, Beijing, Kunming, Burma, or Puer.  Puer is where the famous black tea is still grown.  The museum is in the 200-year-old remains of a roadhouse with a reception room, space for the horsemen to cook and sleep, the horse stable, and a restaurant.  Hanging on the walls were packsaddles and items carried along the trade roads.  It was interesting, but a shame it is not better preserved.

Yunnan Horse Caravan Cultural Museum

Creatively done map of horse caravan routes

Flag of a caravan

Chinese symbol representing the horse

        We walked through the Flying Tigers’ Museum.  The American Army built airstrips in the nearby fields and flew supplies from British Burma to the Chinese who were fighting Japanese intrusion during WWII.  The Japanese captured Burma, closing off ground transportation of goods.  During the war, 609 planes and 1500 Chinese and American pilots were lost because of the difficulty of flying those old planes over the Himalayan Mountains. 

         After visiting the museum, we went to the home of Mr. Lui, the only remaining villager who worked for the Army Air Force during WWII. This 86 year-old man described what he did as a teenager during the war. He was fascinating as he talked about real history.

Transportation of the China-Burma-India Theatre in WWII and Museum of the Flying Tigers

Mr. Lui and our guide, Johnson

After returning to Dali, we went for a short orientation walk in the old city with our local guide, Lisa.

Manhole cover in Dali

Crayfish for sale

Insects for someone's dinner

Very fat frogs - for dinner

Mon., 6/17/13 - Dali
           On the drive to the village of Xizhou, our local guide, Lisa, explained the significance of her colorful Bai traditional dress (see below).
        As we walked into Xizhou, we looked at a series of murals that depicted various Bai festivals - dragon festival, torch festival, marriage ceremonies, etc.  They told many stories of the Bai culture.

Lisa in traditional Bai costume

Traditional Bai dress

        She wears a red pinafore over white sleeves and slacks.  The red color means she is less than 40 years old.  From 40 to age 70 women wear blue and after 70, a very dark blue.  Her headdress tells several stories.  If the thick white tassel is long, she is single.  When a boy touches her tassel it is part of their engagement process.  Lisa is married, so her tassel is shorter.  If her husband dies, it is cut off even shorter.  The tassel hangs on the left side meaning she used her father's surname.  If it is on the right side, the girl uses her mother's name, perhaps because she has no brothers to carry on the family name.
        The hatband has four rows each denoting special meaning to the Bai people.  The white at the top is for the snow on the top of the mountains that provides water for their crops.  The band of flowers represents flowers and the lowest band surrounds her oval face like the moon.  Wind is represented by the tassel.

Bai murals

Bai murals

Symbol of Communist China on the chalkboard - we saw very few of these

An electrical masterpiece

Three-wheeled cart

Horse and cart - waiting for us?