Colored Painting

        The colored painting is a time-honored traditional craft for decorating dwellings in Dali. The colored paintings are mostly combined with curving, commonly appearing on gatehouses, screen walls, waist eaves, folding screens, horse head walls, gables and parts under eaves galleries such as the ceiling, sunk panel and wooden partition. The colored paintings contain patterns including animals, plants, utensils, poems, landscapes, figures as well as historical and fairy tales, rich in content and profound in meaning, symbolizing Bai people's aspiration and blessing for good lives. The rendering craft of colored paintings is unique in local culture. A mixture of pig blood, tung oil and lime called "Zhu Shihui" is commonly used for timber structures while a mixture of purified plaster of paris and stencil tissue paper called "Zhi Jinhui" is commonly used for mud brick walls, in order to preserve the paintings' color. The colored paintings of Bai-people dwellings are widely used in large-scale public and residential buildings such as ancestral temples and temples in Dali. Among them, colored paintings of Bai-people dwellings in Xizhou are most typical. It has been included in the second national Intangible Cultural Heritage protection list published by the State Council in February, 2008.