Other Festivals

Most of the big annual Bai celebrations take place in the spring, before the heavy work or rice cultivation begins, while the weather is still crisp and clear and flowers are blooming profusely. The earliest of these spring festivals is the Birthday of the Floral King,held for three days beginning the 12th day of the 2nd month. Villagers try to gather a hundred different kinds of flowers and make mounds of them all over the plain.

Guan Yin's festival transpires the 19th day of the 2nd month and is the only specifically Buddhist one in the Bai calendar. Bai religion is more a mix of Daoism and their own form of animism. Spirits are divided into the ancestral set (gui) and those associated with wells, springs, woods, lakes, mountains and other sites, collectively called seu. A third element in Bai religion is the veneration of the village founder, called benzhu. Because each village consists of more than one clan, worship of the original founder gives its people a sense of unity. In the 4th lunar month Bai villages stage operas and folk dramas in honour of their benzhu, in addition to chanting sutras and burning incense.

Comparable dances and folk operas are part of the ceremonies of Honouring the Sea God at the Hongsheng Temple Fair the 15th day of the 4th month. The "sea" is, of course, Erhai, and the fair is sponsored by the Bai fishing communities. Eight days later, starting the 23rd day of the 4th month, comes Raoshanling, a 3-day affair that, for the Bai villages of the Erhai plain north of Dali, is the most important festival of the year, eclipsing the totally secularised Third Month Fair.

The festival is intended to fall between the end of the winter wheat harvest and the beginning of the transplanting of rice seedlings. The affair is also called Visiting Three Spirits, which is somewhat more descriptive of the events than Raoshanling, which means Winding among the Mountains. In Bai it's called Gweusala, but no one can give a translation of the term. In fact the festival takes place at a different temple each day, but except for the first day attendance is generally restricted to those villages that lie in the vicinity.

The festival's purpose is to promote fertility; specifically now the coming rice crop, but traditionally it also meant the fertility of women. In past generations this was the time for romantic liaisons in the woods and it was this aspect that led the Nationalist government to officially ban it in the 30's. (The ban was ignored.) Some of the original erotic features survive nowadays in the risque songs sung by the women in the processions.

The opening day is above Qingdong village, at the foot of Wutai Peak. This is the biggest day and the path to the temple is lined with market stalls, food shops and vendors selling the paraphernalia of the festival-tassels of grains and flowers, cloth pendants of hearts and figurines and the round stickers people affix to their brows. Inside the temple devotees offer incense and prayers, bring trays of food to be blessed and form groups that chant sutras.

At the entrance to the temple courtyard a few older men act as scribes to write prayers to the gods for the devotees. These are done on yellow paper, with the donor's name and address at the bottom. The prayer is placed into a rectangular paper box. The devotee takes this to the courtyard and sets fire to it by lighting it from the top. If the flames crackle while the box is burnt that indicates the god has already acknowledged receipt of the message.

The second day's events take place in Hesichong, a small village below Xizhou. Market stalls line the street to the temple again, but of a more modest size, fewer in number, and without a ticket booth at the beginning. The activity within the temple is the same as the previous day's, but this day has one additional feature-a procession through the streets of Xizhou. Participants sometimes wear funny masks, false noses and the like. But the groups always include several women singing and dancing. They stop to perform, making a ring, some twirling batons, others rhythmically knocking their hips against each other.

The third day, smaller still, but perhaps the most enjoyable because of its intimacy, is hosted by Majiuyi, a lakeside Bai village 6 km northeast of Dali. At least one local procession winds through the village and performs in the temple courtyard. In addition, the local orchestra plays a classical set of old tunes. The day's activities are more or less concluded by noon.

The last major festival of the year, the 25th evening of the 6th month (a day behind celebrations in Chuxiong, Ninglang and other Yi areas) is the Torch Festival. Both the Bai in the plains and the Yi in the hills celebrate this with torchlight parades and dances around bonfires. The autonomous Yi counties of Yangbi, Weishan and Nanjian stage special programmes in the county seats. The Bai in the Dali area assemble around the torch, erected in mid-afternoon, at dusk. A troupe of women performs a few dances around its base. Then the torch is lit from the top, so it will burn slowly. Some stay around the torch, shooting off other fireworks, until it is consumed. Others light smaller torches of bamboo and carry them through the paths in the fields and the lanes of the settled areas.

But the Bai have a different origin story for the festival and consequently add a few touches to the events that the Yi don't have. Bai trace the Torch Festival to the founding of Nanzhao. According to the story, since proved apocryphal, the Weishan king invited the chiefs of the other five zhao to a special feast. The Binchuan queen suspected trickery and bade her husband wear an iron ring.

The host seated his royal guests in a pavilion of pine wood, closed off the exits and burned down the building. The Binchuan queen identified her husband's charred corpse by the iron ring. She refused to marry the Weishan king and drowned herself in the lake. Her body was never recovered. To commemorate the event the Bai light a big torch in each village, eat raw pork with dressing and the women paint their fingernails red, to symbolise the bleeding fingers of the Binchuan queen as she groped through the ashes in search of her husband's body.

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