About Dali Television

Dali Television

Overview

Dali Television (Chinese: 大理电视台) is the prefecture-level television station of Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture in western Yunnan, run by the Dali radio and television broadcaster as part of the prefecture's media centre. Its flagship channel serves the prefecture with news, livelihood and cultural programming in Mandarin, with Bai minority culture a distinctive strand. No Chinese prefecture station works in a more storied setting: Dali stands between the Cangshan mountain and Erhai Lake, was the capital of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, and remains the homeland of the Bai people — and the twin facts of tourism and Erhai protection dominate its local coverage.

The prefecture the station serves covers 29,459 square kilometres with a population of some 3.4 million, governed from Dali City at an altitude of about 2,007 metres, where the annual mean temperature is a mild 15 degrees. It is a large, mountainous, multi-ethnic territory, and the television service is its common screen.

The gazetteer: Dali broadcasting remembers itself

Dali's broadcasting has the rare distinction of a published institutional history. The Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture Radio and Television Gazetteer, compiled by the editorial office of the prefecture radio and television bureau and published by the Yunnan Nationalities Publishing House, records the development of broadcasting in the prefecture from around 1930 to the end of 1989, with some material carried into 1990. Its preface is dated 20 August 1990.

The gazetteer runs to more than 180,000 characters, reached publication only after three drafts, and was built from material gathered across the whole prefecture — every county and city bureau and station contributed. Its preface describes the world the early broadcasters had built by 1990: hundreds of thousands of radio and television sets across the prefecture receiving signals transmitted from Dali's own soil, carrying party policy, state law, economic information, social news, scientific knowledge and arts programmes into homes — broadcasting, in the gazetteer's words, as an established part of daily life. The book stands as the documentary foundation of the prefecture's media history, and the modern converged broadcaster is its heir.

A prefecture between mountain and lake

The station's coverage area is defined by two landforms. To the west rises Cangshan, a range of nineteen peaks — the highest above 4,100 metres — threaded by eighteen streams. To the east spreads Erhai Lake, some 250 square kilometres of highland water named for its ear-like shape, praised as the "Pearl of the Plateau" and the second largest highland lake in Yunnan. Between them lie the old town, the prefecture seat and the villages of the Bai plain.

Administratively the prefecture comprises Dali City, a string of counties including Jianchuan, Heqing, Binchuan and Xiangyun, and three autonomous counties — Yangbi Yi, Nanjian Yi, and Weishan Yi and Hui. It neighbours Chuxiong to the east, Pu'er to the south, Baoshan and Nujiang to the west and Lijiang to the north. A prefecture newsroom must cover all of it: lakeside fishing towns, mountain Yi villages and the tourist old town alike.

Capital of two kingdoms

Dali's depth of history sets its cultural programming apart. In 738 the region became the seat of the Nanzhao kingdom, an independent state that controlled the trade routes between China, Southeast and South Asia. In 937 the Duan family founded the Kingdom of Dali in its place; the kingdom endured, with an interruption, until 1253, when Kublai Khan's Mongol army destroyed it. Twenty-two kings reigned across its 316 years, and Dali served as the political, economic and cultural centre of Yunnan for more than five hundred years — an important pass, as local histories put it, on the ancient Southern Silk Road.

The kingdoms were Buddhist, and their monument survives. The Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple are the symbol of Dali: the main pagoda, sixteen storeys and some sixty metres high, has stood for more than a thousand years since the Tang dynasty period. Chongsheng was the royal temple — nine of the twenty-two Dali kings became monks there after abdicating — and when fire destroyed the temple in the mid-nineteenth century, the three pagodas alone survived. For the television service, Nanzhao and Dali are not background but staple subjects: archaeology, restoration and the retelling of the kingdom story run through its cultural output.

The Bai prefecture

Dali is an autonomous prefecture of the Bai people, founded in the 1950s, when the group was officially given the name Bai — meaning "white", for the white clothes the Bai like to wear. Around eighty percent of China's Bai population, counted at over 1.85 million, live concentrated in this prefecture, and Bai form the majority — some sixty-five percent — of Dali City's population, among some twenty ethnic groups in the prefecture overall.

Bai culture gives the flagship channel its distinctive strand, exactly as this profile's source record notes. The Bai are renowned builders — the Three Pagodas are their workmanship — and skilled in wood carving and painting; their tie-dye craft, architecture, festivals, music and oral literature, the so-called Erhai culture of legend and song, supply the station with material no neighbouring prefecture can match. The Bai lion dance, created under Nanzhao, was appreciated at the Tang court, and Bai painters produced the celebrated Nanzhao painting of 899 — early evidence of a culture that has always represented itself in images.

Cangshan and Erhai: the station's visual signature

Local tradition sums the landscape in four sceneries: the wind of Xiaguan, the flowers of Shangguan, the snow of Cangshan and the moon over Erhai. Television, a visual medium, inherits that quartet whole. The snow line above the old town, moonlight on the lake, the flower meadows and the famous Xiaguan wind — driven by the local geography — form the establishing shots of Dali broadcasting, as recognisable to its audience as any channel ident.

Tourism and the Erhai protection story

Dali's old town, three pagodas and Bai villages make it one of China's best-known tourist destinations, and tourism is the prefecture's economic weather: arrivals, festivals, the old town's businesses and the lakeside guesthouse trade are standing items in local news. With tourism comes the prefecture's defining environmental story — the protection of Erhai Lake. The lake that draws the visitors is also a drinking-water source and a fishery, and its water quality, shoreline development and ecological restoration dominate local coverage, as the source record for this profile states. The station's environmental reporting follows the long campaign to keep the "Pearl of the Plateau" clear while the towns on its shore prosper from its beauty.

Dali Television today

Dali Television today works as part of the prefecture's converged media centre, carrying news, livelihood and cultural programming in Mandarin across a prefecture of some 3.4 million people, with Bai culture as its signature strand. Its institutional memory reaches back through the gazetteer to the first wired and wireless broadcasts in the prefecture; its daily agenda runs from Erhai water quality to old-town tourism.

Among China's prefecture stations, it is the one whose patch was a kingdom for five centuries. That inheritance shows in the schedules: a broadcaster for a living Bai homeland, a famous lake and a walled town between nineteen peaks and the water — Dali Television reports on a place the rest of China visits, for the people who call it home.