Dai Temple Art in Jinggu County

                                                       by Jim Goodman

rural life in Jinggu, 17th century carving

       Pu’er Prefecture, with nine counties the largest prefecture in Yunnan, is one of the least visited in the province.  It doesn’t have the dramatic scenery that draws people to other parts of Yunnan.  Ethnic minorities, like Yi, Hani, Lahu, Dai and Wa make up a large proportion of the population.  But except in the southwestern counties, they mostly live and dress like their Han neighbors.  Other than Menglian, which has the original Dai town right next to it, all the cities are modern, with no surviving old quarters, with the only traditional buildings being a few pavilions in the city parks.

       Nevertheless, since I acquired the ambition to see the entire province, I had to make a trip through Pu’er Prefecture as well.  I had a pleasant time in Pu’er city, then called Simao, because of encounters with friendly folks in restaurants and at the reservoir.  There wasn’t much to see in the vicinity, other than sprawling tea gardens and a mini-Stone Forest at Caiyun.  Ning’er, then called Pu’er, and Jiangcheng were boring, even in the markets, and Zhenyuan dirty and ugly.

Dai woman in Jinggu

Tabaoshu--the Pagoda-Wrapped Tree

       I had hopes for Jinggu, though, just because it was a Dai and Yi Autonomous County.  Living in Thailand for several years, it was bound to be of some interest.  Jinggu city lies in a broad valley of the Chengyuan River, which eventually joins with the Lancangjiang (the name of the Mekong River in China).  It’s a manufacturing center, very modern, but with royal palms lining the downtown streets.  In the markets I did see people who were definitely Dai, not Han, recognizable both by their faces and by the women wearing the wrap-around  gray or pastel -colored jacket, with a blouse, black sarong, apron and turban that was the local Dai women’s outfit.

Guanmian Temple in Jinggu city

       Modern Jinggu is an appendage of the original Dai villages around a couple of knolls in the southern suburbs of the city.  The houses are modest versions of the typical mud-brick, tile-roofed Yunnan countryside house.  Lots of fishponds lie in the area and the rice fields begin just beyond the last houses.   Each settlement has its own small temple, with a few resident monks in each.  The people are friendly to strangers, but only the older generation of women dresses in Dai style

       Jinggu city’s one famous monument, Guanmian Temple, sits on a knoll beside Dazhai village.  Built in 1601, wooden, with three tiers of tiled, gently sloping roofs, its only artistic embellishment is the pair of stone lions flanking the entry stairs.  The interior, though, is quite ornately decorated with various things suspended from the ceiling and a large seated Buddha, swathed in yellow robes, sits in the rear.

collaring a dog, the Tree-Wrapped Pagoda

       In the temple courtyard stand two brick and stone, bell-shaped stupas, called the Tree-Wrapped Pagoda and the Pagoda-Wrapped Tree.  In the former, the roots of a tree wrap around the stupa from the base and form into a trunk above the top.  In the latter, the tree grows out of the center of the stupa and rises through the top.

       The stupas stand on square bases with carved stone plaques surrounding the bottom sides.  Here the Jinggu Dai artists of the early 17^th century showed off their skills.  Religious themes do not dominate the sculptures, though.  Instead, the low-relief carvings depict vignettes of daily life, like strolling in a garden, plowing a field, collaring a dog, as well as portraits of people, elephants, wolves, bats, flowers and trees.  It was like the artisans were making a record of their times, carved in stone, for future generations.

       From the courtyard I had a good view of the city and its environs, but unfortunately it was dominated by smokestacks and their emissions.  Just seeing the stone carvings at Guanmian Temple made the trip worth it to me, but I didn’t stay any longer.  However, many years later, traveling through Pu’er Prefecture in the monsoon season, intending to go north from Jingdong to Dali, I wound up in Jinggu again.  Heavy rains had triggered landslides and closed the road north of Jingdong.  The best option was to swing around to Lincang and get to Dali from the southwest.

Yongping temple's library

phoenix strut under a library roof

       I took the bus south to Jinggu, but didn’t stay there.  I headed west to Yongping to stay the night and catch the bus to Lincang from there next morning.  Yongping is a quiet little town with a tree-lined main street, no real restaurants, but an open square at the top of the main street where I could get grilled food and beer.  As it was near dark when I arrived, I didn’t explore the town much.  But I would get my chance.

assembly hall of Yongping's 18th century temple

       The next morning the skies were gray but it wasn’t raining, so I anticipated a long but sure ride to Lincang.  But as soon as we got off the paved roads of the Yongping suburbs and got on the dirt connecting road to the highway to Lincang, that already began to look problematical.  The dirt road was now a slippery mud road full of puddles of unpredictable depths.  After very slow progress, the bus finally got stuck in a puddle in which it seemed stuck until dry season.  A bus coming the other way informed us that the road was blocked.  Landslides again.  Nearly all the passengers were only going several kilometers, so they got off the bus and walked.  I returned to Yongping, which was just two kilometers away.

       Now I would have to go all the way back to Kunming to get to Dali.  I couldn’t do that until the next morning anyway, but as it turned out Yongping and vicinity had attractions that more than compensated for the long detour ahead.  Most of Jinggu’s Dai live in the west and southwest of the county.  The older Dai women around Yongping dress like those in Jinggu city, but the Dai men and the younger generation wear modern clothes.  

rural scene carved on the temple's stone base

Dai shoppers in Yongping

      They are Theravada Buddhists, but apparently, judging by the dearth of hilltop pagodas and village shrines, not so religious-minded as the Dai in Xishuangbanna, Dehong or even Gengma.  They do have a couple of temples in the area, though; one on the southern edge of town and another, truly outstanding, 17 km south at Qiannuo.

       Yongping’s temple is an 18^th century wooden structure with three wide, tiled roofs and an extra roof added over the entrance.  It’s a darker color and a little longer than Guanmian Temple in Jinggu, which gives it a more harmonious look. It has no struts supporting the roofs, the corners of which are not upturned.   The building sits on a stone base, carved panels around it, most of them completely worn.  A few are still in good condition: one of a boy, another of an elephant and the best one, a farmer playing a flute while riding a water buffalo.  A very large Buddha image sits in the rear of the temple’s interior, along with other images, while several long, narrow cloth banners hang from the ceiling, woven by the local women as gifts to beautify the temple.

Qingfo Temple, Qiannuo village

       In the courtyard, the library, a three-tiered wooden building on a brick and stone hexagonal base, houses the temple’s religious manuscripts, keeping them high and dry and safe from floods and insects.  Unlike the main building, the library features much more artistic embellishment, like carved shutters, eaves and brackets and the dragon and winged phoenix struts that support the tiled roofs.  These additions make the library an altogether more interesting building, artistically speaking, than the relatively unadorned assembly hall.

       To see the highest achievements in Jinggu County art and architecture, one needs only to proceed along the valley south from Yongping 17 km to Qiannuo, a large Dai village that’s home to Qingfo Temple.  The wooden assembly hall, built in 1778, has three tiers of wide, sweeping tiled roofs with upturned corners and also stands on a stone base with carved panels all along the sides.  Unlike the Yongping temple, though, artisans have covered practically every space on the Qingfosi temple with some kind of artistic enhancement.  

musicians on a carved bracket

       The walls between the roofs feature rows of wooden blocks, mostly bright blue, like a grill around all four sides.  Underneath these on the top level are panels of different kinds of vases, and occasionally people dressed in classical Chinese robes, in gold against a black background.  From the apex of the roof hangs a slender, red wooden fish, outlined in white, a symbol of water to counter the threat of lightning.

       The walls of the ground floor, brackets, eaves and some of the supporting posts are dark red, with all the designs lacquered in gold.  The pillars in front of the entrance are gray, but also with gold designs, only on the upper half for the side posts, but from top to bottom on the two central pillars.  These two are covered with repeating motifs of wavy spirals, resembling the lines of flower petals seen from above.    Near the top of each post the front part of a dragon’s body comes right out of the pillar, with the end of its tail emerging from the other side.  To the right, under the eaves, sits a paper white elephant that’s taken out for a procession on Guanmenjie, the beginning of the Buddhist retreat season.

       Like the bases of the two pagodas in Jinggu and the temple library in Yongping, that around the main hall of Qingfo Temple is also a gallery of pictures carved in stone.  Some of them are animal portraits, like birds, deer and elephants.  Others are wider panels, with vases full of vegetation bracketing low-relief vignettes of daily life:  enjoying a banquet, riding horses, hunting with a crossbow, riding boats, sitting at a lecture, confronting a tiger, etc.

monk with his manuscripts, inside Qingfo Temple

       Two and a half centuries of wind and rain have worn some of the edges of these stone sculptures, but the carvings on the wooden doors, brackets and shutters, all lacquered in gold against a dark red or black background, are in pristine condition.  Many of them are the usual birds, flowers, zodiac animals, dragons and lions, all of them skillfully rendered.  But, as with the stone panels, it’s the scenes of human activity that are far more interesting.

       On the brackets near the entrance musicians play flutes and lutes.  On the door panel a man sits astride a camel.  On another panel a man confronts a tiger in a scene resembling one of the stone sculptures on the base.  A pair of shutters features flanking kings on horseback and another of four panels depicts scholars in gardens.

       The surprise when examining all this imagery is that none of it is religious.  A huge Buddha image sits inside, but the array of images on the exterior is all secular, all derived from nature and daily life.  Unlike Dai Theravada Buddhist temples elsewhere in Yunnan, the artistic embellishment of Qingfo Temple’s exterior did not include images of Buddha, heavenly angels or the mythical hybrid animals one finds in, for example, Xishuangbanna temples just south.   

       A lot of the temple wall imagery resembles that in Chinese Mahayana Buddhist temples, like the vases, the pavilions in the garden scenes, the clothing worn by the human figures.  Where did Qingfosi’s artisans learn to make such sculptures?  The nearest center of Han culture was a long way from the remote and not very rich Qiannuo village.  There wasn’t any local crafts school.  I don’t think the temple hired Chinese artisans from someplace else in Yunnan.  They must have been local Dai artisans.  So what inspired them?

riding a camel

jungle confrontation

       Some of the imagery obviously came from observing activities of contemporary life, like farming, hunting and riding boats or horses.   Portraits of kings on horseback or scholars in a garden simply must have been imagined.  Most of the animals, the birds, wolves, tigers, deer and buffaloes, they would have seen in their environment.  It’s too far north here for elephants, but maybe a sculptor visited Xishuangbanna, not too far and back then full of elephants.  As for what inspired the perfectly realistic camel, the nearest of which are in faraway Xinjang, that remains a mystery.

       I had plenty to speculate upon on my long bus ride to Dali.  I also came to appreciate even more the innumerable attractions of the province.  Bad weather had sabotaged my original plans, but instead steered me to an aesthetic experience that was all the more thrilling because it was unexpected.  Exciting prospects for future exploration began to occupy my thoughts.  How many more interesting sites existed in the unpublicized, scarcely explored, remote counties of Yunnan?  When traveling in this endlessly fascinating province, truly, every landslide has a silver lining.

18th century hunting scene in stone at Qingfo Temple

                                                                   *  *  *  

The Ethnic Mix of Little-Known Menglian County

                                                           by Jim Goodman

       The landscape and culture of southwestern Yunnan’s Menglian County very much resemble that of Xishuangbanna.  Hills rise around the alluvial plains, where the major towns lie along rivers.  The Dai minority nationality dominates the plains population, wet-rice cultivators who live in stilted houses and practice Theravada Buddhism.  Other ethnic minorities, from the Tibeto-Burman and Mon-Khmer linguistic groups, inhabit the hills, growing dry rice, sugar cane or tea.

Dai temple in Menglian old town

       Menglian (the Chinese word for the original Dai Muang Lem) was never administratively part of Xishuangbanna, though.  The southern part of Lancang County separates it from Banna and even today travelers from Banna have to go to Lancang City first, then go southwest to Menglian.  Until the late Qing Dynasty Menglian was an autonomous Dai state, first established in the 13^th century.  The previous century a Dai chieftain in Xishuangbanna had already founded a kingdom, but relations between the two remained friendly.  The two shared a common religion and social order and their Dai dialects are close as well.

       The little Dai state of Menglian not only retained its autonomy over the centuries, it remained aloof from the internecine power struggles that plagued Xishuangbanna throughout the 19^th century, when Jinghong was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt in new locations.  As a result, today virtually nothing remains of old Jinghong palaces, walls, classic buildings, etc, while Menglian’s old Dai 

riverside chedi

quarter still exists, nestled on a gentle slope beside the west bank of the river, opposite the new city.  In the past, the ruling family, state officials and nobles lived in the upper part of the slope, while the commoners lived on the flat section at the base of the hill and in hamlets across the river.  Today this section has become part of Menglian’s commercial quarter, but the upper part of the old town is still in place.

       Most of the houses have in the past decade or so replaced their bricks and tiles with cement and corrugated iron.   They retain the Dai style, though, with angled roofs and sculpted peacocks below the roof apex.  And while a couple of new, large temple compounds have gone up in recent years at the base of the hill, the old quarter still retains two of its old temples, with wooden walls and tiled roofs, further up the slope. 

       The old quarter also retains the former ruling chao’s palace, now the city museum, just above the ceremonial center of the town, about midway on the slope.  Though it’s obviously the biggest residential compound around, as a palace it is relatively modest.  The chao and his wife slept on simple mattresses on the floor, rather like the commoners, and did not furnish the place with a lot of fancy furniture, even in the royal audience hall.  The kitchen is not particularly capacious, the buildings not embellished with ornate carvings and other decorations, the heirlooms on display not evidence of a rich royal family. 

the former ruling chao muang's compound

       So it was not a particularly wealthy state, but it didn’t really need to be.  It had no quarrels with its neighbors.  Its people carried on with their lives in pretty much the same manner in the past as they do today.  They raise their crops, perform their daily chores and attend the periodic markets.  They have electricity now, modern communications devices like cell phones and computers, vehicles like motorbikes and tractor-trailers, but their lives are still ruled by the seasons.

       Menglian today still has that relaxed, laid-back atmosphere that must have characterized the former chao muang’s realm.  The city is not very big. From the new bus station on the expanded eastern edge of the city it’s but twenty minutes walk to the river.  Traffic is not very heavy yet.  The main road crosses the river and continues to other points in the county all the way to

Dai grill stand in Menglian city

the Myanmar border.  But above this road, taking a walk up the slope through the old town to the former palace or the two old temple compounds is like strolling through a quiet rural village.  The old town is beyond the hearing range of city traffic sounds.

       The new city is never very noisy, anyway.  Buildings are rarely more than four stories high, maximum seven, and no towering skyscrapers dominant the skyline as in Jinghong.  On my first visit in September, 1998 a row of attractive buildings and a gilt chedi lined the river’s east bank just below the bridge to the old town.  

Menglian riverside, 1998

After the turn of the century I found the city demolished all but the chedi, replacing them with a football field.  But a couple years later the city established a new park further downriver from the chedi, that included bronze sculptures of ethnic minority activities, a performance park, temple and other chedis, carved pillars and a palm-lined walkway beside the river to the southern bridge.

       Menglian is officially a Dai, Lahu and Wa Autonomous County in Pu’er Prefecture.  The Aini, though, are also a numerically significant presence and so the park’s sculptures include them as subjects, too.  Depictions of ethnic life include an Aini woman carrying a pack basket that uses a shoulder board and head-strap, as well as Dai farmers in the rice field, a Wa woman making liquor, a Lahu woman weaving with a back-strap loom, Dai dancing girls, a Wa hunter and a Lahu fisherman.  The performance area is the venue for government holiday events, but also the programs, usually dances, associated with the Dai Water-Sprinkling Festival and the Wa New Rice Festival.  At those times villagers of all ethnic minorities are in the city to watch the show and their colorful presence enhances the events.

Lahu women in Menglian for market day

Dai thread merchants, Menglian market

       They will also come to Menglian, in only slightly greater numbers, for the market day the city hosts every five days.  Arriving in trucks, minibuses and tractor-trailers, Dai, Lahu, Wa and Aini villagers swarm into the city from early morning.  Most of then are women and dress in all or part of their traditional outfits.  Among the Dai, it’s generally just the older women in ethnic clothing, dominated by white, gray, blue and black, with white turbans.  The Lahu women dress in red and 

Wa cap and earplugs

black sarongs and jackets.  Wa women are distinctive both by the style of sarong, the cap laden with silver chains, perhaps with s smoking pipe tucked into the top, and the large silver ear plugs and disc pendants they favor for jewelry.  

       Aini women, though, are the real standouts.  From dark indigo cotton cloth they weave and dye themselves they make an outfit that consists of a plain short skirt, pleated in the back, a colored and beaded sash hanging in front, a heavily embroidered jacket with appliquéd stripes on the sleeves, leg-wrappers similarly appliquéd, embroidered shoulder bag and an elaborate headdress.

       Basically the headdress is a fitted skullcap with a plate rising behind it, straight at the bottom and rounded at the top.  Rows of silver studs and beads cover the surface of the cap, while a false hair part protrudes below the front rim.  The back plate is covered in black cloth and often decorated with strings of beads and rows of silver studs.  From the sides of the headdress they might drape loops of beads and to the cap attach flowers, tassels, pompoms or green beetle wings. 

Aini woman checks for messages

AIni woman, Menglian market

       Many of the Aini men also show up in traditional attire, though of course these are less spectacular than the women’s.  The outfit comprises plain trousers, moderately embroidered jacket and plain turban.  Lahu, Dai and Wa men dress in modern style for the most part.  But men are a minority anyway in the city on market day, for women both run the stalls and do the shopping.  The big, covered central market is the main venue.  But on the side streets beside it villagers set up rows of stalls.  Aini women selling mountain and forest products—wild vegetables, mushrooms, herbs, bamboo grubs and bee larvae—will occupy one lane.  On another lane Dai women sell medicinal herbs and plants, vegetables, rice, farm tools and wooden items like mortars, chopping blocks, bowls, etc.  On other streets, for market day is not confined to only one area, Wa and Lahu women set up stalls to hawk their particular products. 

the Menglian Lahu ethnic style            

       Besides Menglian city itself, each district in the county holds its own regular market day.  The composition of the crowd will change according to the location.  The Aini who are so prominent in the Menglian market are elsewhere only present for market day in the border town of Mengxin, directly south of Menglian.  To the north and northwest, in hilly Nanya, Fuyan and Gongxin districts, some Dai come up from the valleys, but those in the market are mainly Wa, from the higher villages, and Lahu from lower on the slopes. 

       Southwest of Menglian, on the main road to Myanmar, Dai and Lahu dominate the Mengma market.  In Menga, the border town, the venue is a pleasant shady grove at the edge of town.  Besides the Dai locals, those in attendance include Wa and Lahu from both China and Myanmar.  You can sort of tell them apart, even when they belong to the same sub-group.  The poorer they appear to be, the more they just look around at all the goods and the less they actually purchase, the more likely they are to be from Myanmar.

winnowing grain near Mengma

       Both Mengma and Menga are plains towns, so the area around them mostly consists of Dai villages, plus a handful of resettled Wa hamlets.  Lush rice fields flank both sides of the highway and occasionally bamboo bridges span the stream running alongside.  The best time to enjoy this scenery is early autumn, when the fields turn golden yellow and the people are out in big groups, harvesting the crop together.  After they have threshed the grain they next winnow it by standing on a stilt.  The grain thus has further to fall than if they were doing it standing on the ground and the wind has more time to blow away the chaff.  The method may be unique to Menglian, for I’ve not seen it elsewhere in the province.

       Farmers in the hills grow a different kind of rice, but nowadays far less than in the past.  Many villages now raise tea or sugarcane as a cash crop, since these do not take so much out of the soil as rice does, so they do not need to make new fields for rice cultivation every two years.  Tea factories have been set up in the hills and during the tea boom times in Xishuangbanna several years ago, Menglian County tea cultivators also got a windfall.  They didn’t spend it on building a “modern style” concrete house to replace their own, though, as so many newly rich Banna people did.  Traditional style still characterizes houses in the tea garden villages in the hills of Menglian County.      

Wa woman, Mengxin district

       Despite its obvious attractions, Menglian still draws few tourists.  Compared to Xishuangbanna, it is less congested, less “touristy” and money–oriented, more authentic, its historical relics more intact, its ethnic minorities more colorful and traditional, yet it gets only a tiny sliver of the crowd that visits Banna.  Menglian’s people don’t particularly resent that.  They know their county is rather remote and not as well connected as Banna.  The few foreigners who make it there find the people quite friendly and quick to smile.  Minority women in town for market day do not avoid the camera nor shy away from their rare sight of a foreigner.  In fact, they may become curious, especially the Wa, and approach the visitor, not to sell some trinket or other, but to engage in a short conversation, short because of their own limited knowledge of Chinese.

       This is also true in the villages far from the city.  In my own excursions in the hills there I found my unexpected presence taken not as an intrusion but as a welcome interruption.  I could not be there more than five minutes before someone rushed to invite me inside the house for tea and talk.  Learning that I lived in Thailand provoked questions about the differences between the life of the Wa, Lahu or Aini there and in Menglian; or even between Menglian and Xishuangbanna.

       The big difference is that Menglian doesn’t have a tourist industry.  Villagers might feel less welcoming if busloads of camera-toting strangers descended regularly on their settlements or surrounded them in the city on market day to get selfies with the lady in the exotic costume.  In the 14 years since my initial and my most recent visit to Menglian, the city has added new suburbs as well as parks, and the people are as friendly, approachable and hospitable as ever.  Tourists are still rare and maybe that’s why the place is so relaxed and genuine.  And because it’s so off the beaten track, maybe it will stay charming for a long time to come.

Aini woman, Menglian market

* * *

       for more on the Lahu and Aini see my e-book Xishuangbanna: the Tropics of Yunnan