Dali beyond the postcard: music, art and the people who stayed

The 2014 film Breakup Buddies, starring Xu Zheng and Huang Bo, brought a fresh wave of attention to Dali. A place already associated with mountains, lake views and artistic life became the setting for many more imagined departures. Visitors arrived with songs in their heads; some stayed long enough to build a different everyday life.

This is a portrait of that earlier cultural moment. The names and small venues belong to a changing community, while the geography is easier to recognise: Cangshan behind the town, Erhai beyond it, and room between them for streets, villages and fields. Dali’s appeal lay partly in the range of lives that could coexist there.

Renmin Road: songs, paintings and a poetry bar

Renmin Road became one of the clearest expressions of that atmosphere. Music drifted from bars, and a singer with a guitar could draw drummers and other musicians into an improvised circle. The pleasure was not only a scheduled performance; it was the way a pavement could briefly become a gathering place.

Among stalls selling ordinary small goods were painters offering their own work. Selling a picture could pay for another stretch of life in Dali or a journey to paint elsewhere. That modest economy matters to the street’s reputation: artistic life was also rent, food and the next trip.

The middle of Renmin Road once had a place called Dushi Ba, the Poetry-Reading Bar, where people met to read and discuss their lives and ideals. It had already closed during the period being described. Its painted wall remains a useful image of how temporary some of these cultural spaces were. Small bars, cafés and studios changed with the people running them.

The artistic map reached beyond one street

Director Zhang Yang’s 37-minute documentary-style short Living Elsewhere gathered another side of Dali’s artistic life. Its title, echoing Milan Kundera, expressed the hope that a different way of living might exist beyond the city one had left.

There were established artists as well as pavement performers. Shen Jianhua built Baiju at Huoshan and founded a farmers’ painting group. Han Hsiang-ning developed the Erju Art Museum; Ye Yongqing spent time in Dali, and folk musician Zhou Yunpeng also made a home there. Their work placed artistic activity in the landscape as well as in the old town.

More room for different ways of living

Tea practitioner Wang Bo had been a bar singer in Lijiang before moving with his wife and daughter to Dali. His explanation of the difference was spatial: living below Cangshan, in the old town, among fields or beside Erhai could feel like four different lives. Someone who found the town too busy could look towards the mountains or villages without leaving the wider Dali world.

The cultural room mattered as much as the physical room. A documentary filmmaker known as Sige was planning a small bookshop after years travelling western Yunnan. Designer Gao Ludong’s encounter with Jizhao Nunnery became part of the story of its renewal and the succulent-filled setting for which it became known.

Experiments also reached family life. Maomaoguo Kindergarten developed as an alternative early-childhood community, with an emphasis on helping children face an uncertain future and shape their own lives. Its significance here is as part of a local willingness to try ideas outside established urban routines. It sits alongside art, tea, books and religious spaces in the account of why people chose to stay.

Conversation without the usual introductions

One recurring idea was that social rank felt flatter. An artist, executive, shopkeeper or newcomer could sit down together without leading with qualifications. Maomaoguo founder Chen Gang put the emphasis on people coming to live: shared interests could start a long conversation before anyone knew what the others did for work.

That openness had its own tensions. Travel professional Wenjie described a degree of self-display in Dali: instead of presenting wealth or a job title, people might present an unusually interesting personality or personal story. The wish to escape labels could produce another kind of introduction. Starting over did not remove the wish to make an impression.

Those who arrived, left and returned

Some newcomers hoped to begin a comfortable life; others prepared to leave disappointed. Long-term residents, returnees, artists, traders and guesthouse owners all helped shape the same place. The town’s history of religious culture, exploration and trade met a new generation of people testing what “elsewhere” might mean.

Zhang Yin, founder of Shouhuo Coffee, offered a useful thought: newcomers act as catalysts, while Dali continues to absorb and change them. For a visitor, that is a reason to give an ordinary street time—listen to a song, look closely at a painting, or sit with a cup of tea. Current opening details are best checked locally; the cultural story is larger than any one bar’s sign.