The Third Month Fair

The greatest event of the year in Dail is the Third Month Fair, beginning on the full moon of the 3rd lunar month. According to local mythology this is the day Guan Yin came to Dali. The festival dates its antiquity to the beginning of the Nanzhao era, but it has long since evolved into a grand commercial affair and runs at least a week. Guan Yin now has her own festival the 19th day of the 2nd moon, so the Third Month Fair has become strictly secular.

Promising lavish entertainment as well as a plethoraof trade goods, the fair attracts local people of the many ethnic groups and sub-groups in the prefecture, others from further away, Han from the western parts of the province and Chinese and foreign tourists in abundance. The usual estimate for attendance this week is over a million. Many branches of the Bai and Yi turn up, all wearing their best traditional costumes. The fair also hosts Tibetans marketing herbs and animal parts used in medicine and Yi horse and mule traders from the northwest, recognisable by their long woolen capes. Visitors may even include the rarely seen Lisu from the western mountains above Xinwo village in Songgui township.

The venue for the commerce is the slope just west of the old town. The stone memorial tablets honouring Kubilai Khan's conquest are housed in a small, walled courtyard partway up this slope. Erected in 1304, the tablets narrate the Khan's crossing into Yunnan and his subsequent capture of the city. Shop buildings have been constructed in recent years on a new lane, from the memorial to the road, for merchants to use for the fair, while tented stalls are grouped all around the area. Livestock of all kinds are sold in an adjacent field. Besides articles of everyday use such as are sold in the area's market days, costume parts, antiques, arts and crafts of all kinds, herbal medicine and furniture are among the goods on offer.

Since this is a government-subsidised festival, the entertainment aspect gets top attention. Parades proceed through town, with dragon dances and a colourful range of ethnic minority performances. Besides these acts, in which watching the crowd observing the action can be as enthralling as the dances themselves, athletic contests, acrobatics, bulls in combat, archery tournaments and pony races are all part of the week's excitement.