One Afternoon in Dali

Dali endeared itself to me on two very different fronts: its raw meat market and its music.

Allow me to explain.

After a relaxing Western breakfast of fried eggs, toast, and hash browns at one of Dali’s several Western cafes, we decided to explore the city and get away from all of the tourism and “fakeness.” So, backpacks on our backs and cameras in hand, we took to the streets, through alleyways and down unmarked roads.

Upon coming to a bustling food market in the outskirts of the Old City, we decided to go in and peruse the food selections.
Ooo, this will be great. I’m pumped to take some quaint, colorful photos of oranges, bananas, and pineapples.




As soon as we started making our way through the aisles of goods, however, we realized this was no quaint fruit market. This was a bustling, raw, down-and-dirty Chinese meat market.

We meandered past buckets of fish lashing around futilely, rows of chicken coops filled with unlucky birds waiting to be handpicked for slaughter, and dirty pig pens. As we rounded a corner, we saw a man gutting a chicken with his bare hands, then handing it off to the lucky purchaser who’d just scored himself an avian meal for dinner. We witnessed a row of pig heads, each attended to by one person whose task it was to break the jaw from the head with his hands in preparation for consumption.
Yep, we were definitely off the beaten path now.

The oddest thing was, we didn’t attract any attention at all. Nobody really looked at us as though we were a novelty, or as though we were out of place in this bastion of traditional Chinese culture. Nobody really paid much attention to us at all. As we meandered past their stalls and stands, they went about their jobs as though we weren’t there. It was as though we were ghosts, moving unseen through the throngs of people jostling for fresh fish and fruit. It was an odd sensation, considering the fact that being a foreigner in China almost always attracts a bevy of attention—both wanted and unwanted.

After we’d had our fill of pig heads and chicken guts, we exited the market in search of more of this raw authenticity that we’d been craving.

We found it in the form of a community park near the north side of the Old City. There, a host of elderly locals had gathered to enjoy the nice weather and each other’s company. Feeling charmed by picturesque scene, we sat down on one of the benches to people-watch. Groups of old ladies, dressed in vibrant clothes of intricately interwoven colored threads, sat in huddled circles, laughing, joking, and reminiscing with each other. Clusters of old men leaned lazily against the park’s stone pillars, dressed in matching blue workers’ jackets and blue berets, dragging on their cigarettes and mumbling short, pithy phrases to each other as they surveyed their surroundings.

But what really drew our attention was a group of elderly men and women who’d assembled near the back of the park. They’d erected rusty music stands and placed crumbled sheets of Chinese music on the shelves. Fine tuning and testing their instruments, they leaned back in their chairs and chatted with one another. Hoping they’d begin play, we sat down and waited.



Suddenly, the cacophony of discordant tunings and testings melted away into a harmonious melody of traditional Chinese music. As the music reached its crescendo, the other park goers took notice and gathered around the spontaneous band. Old women started dancing merrily with each other to the music, and young children wobbled unsteadily on their stubby legs in tandem with the beat. One man joined in with his own hand held clapper instrument, and began a dramatically dancing to the music.



We sat there, entranced and charmed by the peaceful scene we’d stumbled upon. It was music for the sake of music. Happiness for the sake of happiness. There was beauty in the simplicity of the joy we were witnessing. I can’t quite articulate how I felt as I listened to the band, but I do know that we sat there for a nearly an hour, mesmerized by the scene unfolding in a little park in a little town in southwestern China.