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Temples and Elephants
Dai religious architecture follows the Theravadin Style of its Buddhist ethnic cousins in Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. Every fair-sized Shui Dai village has its own temple compound. The main hall, with its tall, sloping roofs, usually in three layers, dominates the village skyline. The roof is supported by thick red wooden pillars, often decorated with painted gold or silver patterns, like in the area just below the apex of the roof on the front facade, unless a Buddha image is mounted there.
On the exterior walls next to the entrance, and sometimes around the sides, are panels painted with Buddhist and Dai imagery. The latter includes scenes from local history, vignettes of the Dai rural lifestyle, pictures of Dai worshippers, and so on. The Buddhist imagery features not only portraits of the Buddha, scenes from his life and depiction of celestial cities, religious processions, rituals and the like, but also the local mythology of Judgment Day. The God of Death rewards some by directing them to Heaven and casts the others to the depths of Hell. Here demons perform sundry tortures on the damned according to the type of sin. The artists' imaginations are at their best in these scenes, as if they had first studied Dante's Inferno.
The interior of the hall houses the main Buddha image, usually seated, with a few smaller images to the sides and in front. From the rafters they hang many long, narrow cloth banners, with various designs woven into them. A few may be of paper or even currency notes. The interior wall surfaces are usually plain, but some individual posters may be mounted on the posts and decorated palanquins, used to carry images during processions, are stacked in the corner.
Monks' quarters are the smaller buildings, usually behind the temple, with Spartan interiors. Older monks spend their lives here, while among the younger residents, some stay for a certain period of time, say a year or two, some study to make a career out of monkhood. The discipline is not as strict as in Myanmar or Thailand. Monks do not go on morning begging bowl rounds, nor are they forbidden to eat past noon. They can eat whenever they like, in restaurants as well, and even have a beer with the meal.
The compound may include a pagoda in the yard in front of the main hall. Or a pagoda may instead stand atop a nearby hill. The shape is usually simple, rising from a wide round or square base, tapering sharply to a point, tipped by an elaborate gilt metal crown, with little pendants flopping in the breeze around its base.
Sometimes, such as the one at Mengzhe, the pagoda does not taper so much, looking more like bowls of ever smaller size piled on top of each other, with niches chiseled into the sides for Buddha images. On the hilltop just north of Menglong stands Manfeilong Pagoda, the most outstanding in the prefecture. It is surrounded by a wall, with smaller pagodas at regular intervals and three-headed serpents sculpted on the staircase. Originally built in 1203, it has been restored and expanded several times since.
On just about every small hill in the Menghai plain a pagoda stands on the summit, with or without a temple. New ones are going up every year, at least partially financed by money from Buddhists in Thailand and Singapore. Pagodas do not always stand by themselves. At Manlei, 7 km west of the city, the temple sits between two pagodas, one 7 metes high, the other 9 metres. On the hill behind Nanban village .in Menghun township is a cluster of 9 pagodas. The tallest rises 13 metres, the other eight 3 metres each.
A very different kind of building, unique in style and decoration, is the Octagonal Pavilion (Bajiaoting), on a hillock beside a large temple overlooking Jingzhe village, 24 km west of Menghai. So named because of its octagonal base and eight main sides, it was built in 1701 of brick and wood, used for storing Buddhist scriptures. At its base it is 10 metres wide and stands 21 metres high, the top section divided into a couple dozen smaller sides, with altogether 32 angles and a complex set of roofs, rising in layered tiers to the top.
Whenever a new temple, pagoda or major Buddha image is to be dedicated the vicinity takes on the appearance of a festival. Many monks take part in the ceremonies and devotees turn out in the hundreds. The women wear their best blouses and sarongs, sometimes a whole contingent from a single clan or neighbourhood in the same colours, pin flowers to their hair and put on their fanciest gold jewellery. The events at the dedication are not Al solemn, for this is also a time to fire off rockets, attached to long bamboo poles and mounted on launching stands in the fields.
Occasionally along the bases of pagodas are sculptures of elephants. Not only do elephants reside in the jungles of Xishuangbanna, they figure in Buddhist mythology. Among the vignettes painted on temple walls will be one of an elephant bowing on the ground before the Buddha, for the animal in this famous story recognised him as an Enlightened One and at once paid obeisance. The elephant is also associated with royalty, for Dai princes rode them to war and in state processions.
Wild elephants still roam Banna's jungles, especially in the protected area of Sanchahe Park, 62 km north of Jinghong. The park entrance leads to a long line of concrete guest houses, restaurants and karaoke bars, but viewing towers have been erected behind the built-up area. Elephants don't recognise park boundaries, though, and occasionally passengers on inter-city bus rides can spot them lumbering along the highway. Besides the elephants, the dense forests here and elsewhere in the prefecture contain wild oxen, gibbons, bears, perhaps tigers still, but certainly smaller wild cats, otters, civets, pangolins, peacocks, hornbills, pheasants and some 400 other species of birds, amounting to a third of the total in all of China.
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