Dayao County

Lisu also inhabit the somewhat lower mountains south of Xiaoliangshan in Yongsheng and Huaping Counties. In Yongsheng their villages are mainly in the mountains on the right bank of the Jinshajiang, west of the county seat. Occasionally they can be seen near the bridge that crosses into Lijiang County, the women in long skirts of alternating blue and white pleats and black turbans. No one ever visits them.

In Huaping County a cluster of Christian Lisu villages lies in the hills of Lagahe township, northwest of the county seat. Their women wear one of the most attractive of the many Lisu costumes. The long pleated skirt, mostly maroon in colour, is fastened with a wide sash belt and worn with a colourful, side-fastened jacket, heavily embroidered on the cuffs, shoulders and lapel. Topping it off, they don a bright, round turban, with pendants of pearls dangling all around.

The Jinshajiang is the boundary for both Yongsheng and Huaping Counties with northwestern Chuxiong Prefecture. Ferries operate on Sundays at a crossing point several km west of Wanbi, the Dai riverside township at the northern limit of Dayao County. The mountains on either side of the river are big and barren, the flow quite swift and the thin, low-lying plateau on the right bank, where the Dai have settled, doesn't extend very far. Dai houses resemble those of their Yi neighbours to the south, which are basically of the standard Yunnanese rural style.

Wanbi is quite isolated, for most of Dayao County, even its mountain townships, is accessed from the south, via Nanhua on the Chuxiong-Dali route. Turning north here, the road ascends in three major stages before entering Dayao, 81 km north of Nanhua. The town is nearly all Han-inhabited, for the area was one of the earliest in Yunnan to have a continuous Han administration. Yao'an, 35 km south, was a Tang Dynasty administrative centre of some importance until absorbed by Nanzhao in the 8th century.

Nothing of the Nanzhao era survives in Yao'an today. The town's old quarter is largely Hui. But Dayao boasts a pagoda from that era, famous for its unusual shape. Known both as the White Pagoda, for its colour,and the Bell Stick Pagoda, for its resemblance to the stick used to strike bells in a Buddhist temple, it sits atop a knoll beside the town and is visible as soon as one enters the plain from the south. Rising from an octagonal platform to a height of 18 metres, this solidly built pagoda has stood erect through major earthquakes, with its only scar a one metre-long crack near the top.

The county's other major religious relic is the great bronze Confucius statue housed in Shiyang township, 36 km west of Dayao. Weighing around 1000 kg, the 2.5 metre-high image of the seated sage, crowned and holding a tablet, is the only extant bronze Confucius in mainland China.

Shiyang, which means Stone Ram, is named after a stone ram allegedly found long ago when the great salt well in the middle of the town was being dug. It has an attractive location in a narrow valley, with old-fashioned buildings for the most part and little cave-pens for the pigs in the side of the hill. A Buddhist temple sits on the slope of the south bank hill. About 3 km east a hill just off the road has several Daoist shrines, some in small caves, with strange-looking statues, like the one of a man peeling off his face to reveal another, different one underneath.