Bai People’s Residence

Most Bai People’s constructions are located in Bai communities in Dali, Eryuan, Jianchuan, Heqing, etc, in Yunnan provice. Their residence is mostly of two floors, three rooms on each floor, double-eaved tile roof, and a entrance corridor. The foot of wall, upper doorfram, upper windowfram and eave are often made of stone blocks or bars with geometry lines, spots and figures on. The wall is built with natural cobblestones, and plastered with lime. White walls and gray tiles even enhance the brightness of the house. Walls and corners are mostly decorated with patterns of wash paintings, elegant and of taste. Woockcarving skill is also applied quite often on grid door, horizontal bar, and railing of corridor, the woodcarving on grid door is especially conspicuous.

The common constructing patterns are “two main rooms with one side room”, “three rooms with a screen wall facing the gate of house”, and “quadrangle with five open ceilings” in houses of some rich families, which means four tall rooms, four side room, one big open ceiling, and four small open ceilings. In addition, they have “hexagon celebration spring together”, “attic with revolving corridor that allows horse riding” whose corridor connects the two floors and is wide enough for horse riding, and “eighteen corners”…

Bai People’s residence pay much attention to the construction of the gateway, screen wall, the carving on doors and windows, and cloured drawings and patterns on main wall. The gateway is the essence of the whole construction, and the symbol of bringing honour to ancestors. It is often built with clay sculptures, wood sculptures, marble screen, carved stone, clored drawings or patterns, tiles with convex figures, and gray bricks. The gateway is truely a comprehensive architecture of art. Flying eaves of medium-sized angle, exquisite wood sculptures, and overlapped corbel archs, etc, all the elements serve the gateway to be a exquisite carved, but aolemn art of work.. Many gateways even doesn’t need any nails or other iron item throughout construction, but they are still so solid that they keep standing as steadily as before even several decades later.

Door frams and window frames of Bai People’s residence are always woodcarvings. The engravers often use the techniques of open carving and relief to engrave auspicious things tinged with mystery layer upon layer, for example, white crane and green pine, bittern and lotus, glede and chrysanthemum, peacock and yulan, geometry patterns and so on.

The screen wall is a light pink wall with tile roof and flying eaves. It is a must in Bai People’s residence. It’s also the very place gathering most artistic decorations. The Bai people first make up dimensional patterns of various colors with gray bricks of convex floral figures, then draw light pink pictures in the center of each dimensional pattern, or inlay marbles with natural lanscape on them. Some people may mould two fishes on the two sides of the screen wall, representing “solidarity”. Propitious phrases like “ride the high tide of good luck”, “the purple air comes from the east—a propitious omen appears”, etc, will be written on the face. And parterres are often built on the foot, various beautiful flowers bloom all year round. The screen wall, main room and side rooms together constitute the pattern of “three rooms with a screen wall”.