Nanzhao fragments and the kingdom below Dali

We arrived at the south edge of the old palace ground a little after eight, when the dew was still holding on the longer grass and the loudspeaker from a primary school somewhere beyond the eucalyptus was running through its morning announcements in two languages. Dr Wang was already there, a thermos in one hand and a roll of tracing paper under his arm, standing at the corner where a low brick wall meets a poured-concrete kerb. He did not turn when we came up the path. He was looking at a single brick about knee-height in the wall, and waiting, we understood later, for the angle of the sun to shift another finger's width so that the stamp on its face would read properly.

Dr Wang is fifty-seven and has worked the Nanzhao and Dali sites west of Erhai Lake since 1994. His office at the provincial institute in Kunming is a long way from this stretch of village wall on the outskirts of Taihe, the old Nanzhao capital nine kilometres south of modern Dali town, and he comes down four or five times a year with a satchel of survey tools and a folding camp stool. The wall in front of us was rebuilt in 1986 by a household whose name he knew. It runs about thirty metres along the lane, hip-high, mortared with grey cement. None of it looked old.

He crouched and laid a finger on the brick. The light had moved. We could see, very faintly, a square impression pressed into the clay before firing, three characters and a date. The brick had been stamped at a Nanzhao kiln in the third year of Quanlong Yousheng's reign, which Dr Wang said meant 738 of the common era, four years after Piluoge unified the six zhao under one ruler. It had sat in some wall, possibly several walls, for almost thirteen centuries, and was now holding up a household's vegetable garden. The family who rebuilt the wall had bought the brick by the cartload from a demolition site two villages over. Nobody had told them what it was. Nobody, including themselves, had needed to know.

We spent the morning walking with him along the south rampart line of the old palace city, which is not visible to the eye but which he carries as a map in his head. He would stop at a culvert or a corner of a courtyard and say, the wall went through here, then turn ninety degrees and walk forty paces and stop again. The Nanzhao kingdom, he reminded us, ran from 738 to 902 and at its widest controlled territory from northern Burma to western Sichuan. It minted its own coins, kept its own court records in a script we have lost, and sent envoys to both the Tang court at Chang'an and the Tibetan kings at Lhasa, playing one against the other for a hundred and fifty years. The Dali kingdom that followed it lasted another three centuries until Khubilai's cavalry came over the mountains in 1253.

“We spent the morning walking with him along the south rampart line of the old palace city, which is not visible to the eye but which he carries as a map in his head.”

This is not, he said, how the region is usually presented. Yunnan in the visitor literature is a place of minority costume and tea-horse roads, of Bai courtyards and Naxi music, all of which is true but all of which sits at the level of folk culture. What is missing is the administrative and aesthetic intelligence of two non-Han dynasties that ran a state here for half a millennium, built cities on a grid, taxed in cowries and salt, commissioned Buddhist sculpture programs that rival anything contemporaneous in the central plain, and left a stratum of brick and tile that the present landscape is still quietly built on top of.

Around eleven we walked to a low ridge above the village where Dr Wang has supervised three seasons of survey since 2018. The ground was scuffed earth and millet stubble. He squatted and brushed at a clod with his thumb until a curve of grey tile showed through. The tile bore the same square stamp as the brick in the wall: a kiln signature, he said, used by an official works between roughly 730 and 770. The stamps are how the team dates a building when no other evidence survives. Without them, a Nanzhao foundation looks like any other rammed-earth pad. With them, you can tell which decade of the eighth century the workshop was busy, which official commissioned the run, and sometimes, if the run was large enough, where the same bricks ended up. He has traced a single kiln's output to seventeen modern walls in three villages.

The work is slow and underfunded. Provincial money flows toward Han-dynasty and Tang-dynasty sites in the central plain, where the political payoff for new findings is clearer. Nanzhao archaeology in Dali survives on local enthusiasm, a small institute budget, and the unofficial cooperation of village heads who let the team trench in their fields between sowings. Dr Wang has trained six graduate students over the years. Two are still in the field. The rest moved to museum jobs in larger cities where the salary clears.

We sat with him under a pine at the top of the ridge while he ate a steamed bun from a paper bag and poured tea from the thermos into two enamel cups. He talked about the politics of reuse. Every village wall, courtyard plinth, and well-head in this part of the basin, he said, is likely to contain at least one Nanzhao or Dali brick. The bricks were fired hard, shaped to a standard module, and survived the centuries better than the walls they originally held up. When a Ming garrison was built, it cannibalised the Nanzhao city. When a Qing magistrate's office went up, it cannibalised the Ming garrison. When the production team rebuilt the village in 1958, it cannibalised the Qing office. When the household rebuilt their lane wall in 1986, they cannibalised what was left.

None of this is anonymous. The stamps make it readable. But nobody on the lane has time or training to read them. The dating goes on quietly, brick by brick, while the household plants beans against the wall and the school down the road runs through its second announcement of the morning.

By early afternoon the sun was hot and Dr Wang had finished his notes for the day. We walked back toward the village along the lane and stopped, once more, at the brick stamped in 738. He laid a palm flat against it without ceremony. The clay was warm. A woman came past on a scooter with a sack of feed across the footboard and nodded at him as if she had seen him do this before. She had. He stood for another moment, then capped his thermos, slung the satchel back over his shoulder, and walked on.