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a day trip to Dali - Erhai Lake, 3 pagodas, Butterfly Spring & the ancient city11 Nov 2008
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The Three Pagadoas
Dali ancient city, south entrance
tea ceremony in dali
A second entry for today…
We were able to still go on our trip (organised tour), and left on the 10pm train from Kunming to Dali. The train trip was quite an experience. It was a night train with 3 levels of beds. Unfortunately the levels were too high and the compartment too squashy that we couldn’t take a photo to show it. Mum was on the bottom level, Ararbella and I shared the middle level, where we could not fully sit up and Darren had to the top level where he could not sit up at all. On the other side of our 3 beds where 3 others, with the bottom guy a fat old ma who literally farted, coughed and huffed and puffed all night.
We arrived at 7.30am and were taken for a pretty horrible breakfast at a hotel (thank goodness we ended up staying at a different hotel that night. We had ½ hour for breakfast and then started on our tour. The first thing was a cruise on Erhai Hu (Ear-Shaped Lake) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhai_Lake), with a quick stop at an island (forgot the name) to see the Jingui Temple. Unfortunately, Dali is also pretty polluted and so the views of the city and Cangshan Mountain from the lake are not so clear.
We then had a traditional Bai (one of the ethnic minorities in Yunnan) style lunch and went on to see the 3 pagadoas and then the Butterfly Spring.
The Three Pagodas was initially built for auspicious reasons. According to local legends, Dali was once a swamp inhabited by breeding dragons before the humans arrived. As the dragons, which were believed to deliberately create natural disasters to dispel human intruders, revered pagodas, the Three Pagodas were built to deter the dragons. The Three Pagodas are apparently well known for their resilience; they have endured several man-made and natural catastrophes over more than one thousand years. Their mother building was known as Chongsheng Monastery (pinyin Chong Sheng Si, also known as SanTa Si, Tianlong Si) and was once the royal temple of the Kingdom of Dali and one of the largest Buddhist centers in south-east Asia. It was originally built at the same time as the first pagoda, but was destroyed in a fire during the rule of the Qing Dynasty. The temple was later rebuilt in 2005. It was recorded that Qianxun Pagoda had been split in an earthquake on May 6th, 1515 AD (Ming Dynasty). However, it miraculously recovered ten days later in an aftershock. The most recent record of severe earthquake in the Dali area occurred in 1925. Only one in one hundred buildings in Dali survived, but the Three Pagodas were undamaged. The central Qianxun Pagoda was built sometime in the latter half of the 9th century (after the Kaicheng period, 836–840).During repairs in 1979, three copper plates were found at the bottom of the steeple which recorded the exact years of previous repairs, those being 1000, 1142, and 1144.
We walked around the old Dali city, which was more interesting, and then went to our hotel, which we were glad of as we were still tired from not enough sleep the night before.
