The "March Fair," which falls between March 15 and 20 of the lunar calendar, is a grand festival of the Bais. It is celebrated every year at the foot of the Diancang Hill to the west of Dali city. It is a fair and an occasion for sporting contests and theatrical performances. People gather there to enjoy dances, horse racing and other games. June 25 is the "Torch Festival." On that day, torches are lit everywhere to usher in a bumper harvest and to bless the people with good health and fortune. Streamers bearing auspicious words are hung in doorways and at village entrances alongside the flaming torches. Villagers, holding aloft torches, walk around in the fields to drive insects away.
Economy
Before 1949, the feudal landlord economy was dominant in most Bai areas. Incipient capitalism had developed in a few cities and towns, while vestiges of the primitive communalism and remnants of the slave system were still in existence.
About 90 per cent of the people were farmers who possessed only 20 per cent of the arable land.
In areas where the lord system prevailed, peasants were all serfs, who owned neither land nor personal freedom.
In the communal setup in Bijiang and Fugong areas, class distinctions were not clear. There was land which was tilled collectively and the harvest distributed equally among the people. Private ownership of land also was practiced on a small scale. There were also land sales and leasing.
Commercial capitalism found its way into some Bai areas at the beginning of the modern times. Trading companies owned by bureaucrat landlords emerged, shipped in commodities such as yarns and cloth from the United States, Britain and France via India, Burma and Vietnam, and exported gold, silver, and farm and sideline produce.
The Bai people had staged numerous uprisings against the Qing rulers and foreign imperialists. In one of these uprisings, which took place in the mid-19th century, they set up their own political power, the Dali Administration. The new government adopted measures to promote industrial and agricultural production, reduce land taxation and stamp out discrimination against the various nationalities.
New Life
Democratic reform and socialist transformation proceeded in the Bai areas in much the same way as in the Han inhabited areas, but the reforms were carried out in a more gradual manner in those areas with vestiges of pre-capitalist economic organization. Cooperatives were set up to boost production on the basis of abolishing class exploitation and the remnants of primitive communalism.
The Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture was founded in November 1956 after the completion of the democratic reform and socialist transformation.
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