FIELD REPORT 001: THE ANCIENT FORESTS OF DALI
A journey into the ancient forests of Dali
The first expedition entered the ancient forests surrounding Dali.
Beyond the familiar paths of the old town, a hidden landscape remains — where mountains, forests and forgotten cultures continue to exist. Cangshan rises four thousand meters above Erhai Lake, its eighteen streams cutting through primeval forest. Marble — named for this very place — holds the compressed memory of mountains in every vein.
This is not the Dali of postcards. It is a place where grandmothers still tie indigo cloth on wooden frames their great-grandmothers used, where clay guardians still crouch on rooftops with mouths open to swallow misfortune, and where a kingdom ruled this corner of Asia for five hundred years — then vanished from the world's memory.
This report documents the traces left by nature and the people who have protected this land for generations.
WAMAO Rooftop Guardian
Village · Rooftop
Clay · Fire · Ridge-line
Every Bai rooftop in Dali carries a watcher.
The Tile Cat — *Wamao* — is a clay guardian fired from five-colored earth, shaped by the hands of craftsmen who have inherited the same knives and kilns for four generations. It crouches on the highest ridge of every Bai courtyard house, mouth agape, eyes wild, facing outward toward whatever darkness might approach. It is not decoration. It is the first sentinel — the one that meets misfortune before it reaches the family within.
The oldest tile cats in Dali have weathered over a century of monsoon rain and mountain wind. Their clay bodies have softened at the edges. Their open mouths — once sharp with bared teeth — have worn smooth as river stones. But they still sit where they were placed. They still face outward.
For centuries, the forests of Yunnan have been guardians of forgotten stories.
Among the eighteen streams of Cangshan, the Bai people tell of a marble quarryman who spent his final years refusing every offer for his prize stone. It was a single slab of Cangshan marble — unremarkable to the eye, grey-white, heavy as a life's work. But when held to the light, the stone revealed what forty years of quarrying had taught him to see: a phoenix and a peacock courting each other in mineral veins, painted not by a human hand but by the mountain itself over millions of years.
Some stories disappeared with the quarrymen who knew how to read stone.
Some artifacts remained.
The stone — now known as the "Phoenix Courtship" — sits in the Marble Space Museum in Dali. It was the quarryman's final gift, given on his deathbed with one condition: *Keep it in Dali.*
The expedition begins by searching for what was never truly lost.