When Dali Was Its Own Kingdom

The Three Pagodas rise just north of Dali’s old town, the Cangshan foothills stacked behind them like a painted backdrop. Every visitor photographs them. Few pause to ask what they are actually looking at.

They are the most visible remnant of a kingdom that once governed itself here—and did so for more than three hundred years.

From 937 to 1253, the Dali Kingdom operated as an independent Buddhist state within what we now think of as China. While dynasties in the north were consolidating imperial authority, the Duan family ruled this southwestern basin from their own court. They were neither rebels nor provincial administrators. They were sovereign monarchs whose legitimacy rested as much on religious authority as on political control.

Crossroad of cultures

Geography made this possible.

Dali sits at the juncture of Tibet and mainland Southeast Asia. Trade routes carried horses northward and textiles southward. Religious ideas moved just as fluidly. The Bai people, indigenous to this valley, absorbed these currents and fashioned something distinct: a culture that was neither wholly Chinese nor fully Southeast Asian, but unmistakably its own.

"Dali was an original. The pagodas were both devotional structures and quiet declarations of presence. They suggested that this valley was a centre in its own right."

Chongsheng Temple, of which the pagodas formed a part, was the spiritual nucleus of this world. The Buddhism that took root here—often called Azhali Buddhism—drew on tantric traditions from Tibet and India while retaining deeply local ritual characteristics. It differed in tone, texture, and emphasis from the Buddhism practiced in China’s imperial capitals.

Then, in 1253, Kublai Khan’s forces—the grandson of Genghis Khan—absorbed the kingdom into a larger imperial order. Political autonomy ended.

But cultural memory did not.

The Radical Sequence: Of Dali’s 22 rulers, nine abdicated the throne and entered monastic life at Chongsheng Temple. Power, here, was not always something to be held indefinitely. It could be relinquished voluntarily, in pursuit of spiritual authority.

The Spire Cache: In 1978, restoration work on the tallest structure revealed a cache of artefacts sealed within its spire for nearly a thousand years—gold and silver statues, manuscripts, and ritual objects.

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The Final Shot

The pagodas remain where they always have been for over 1,000 years: steady, in situ, against the mountain.

For the traveller with a little curiosity to spare, they offer something beyond a well-composed photograph. They are architectural witnesses to a kingdom that sat at the crossroads of Asia and forged a culture distinctly its own.

The next time you raise your camera, consider what you are actually pointing it at.

You are standing where a kingdom once drew its own borders.

— Mandarin Unpeeled 🍊