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Travelling through Dali with a leg of ham

By Mike Peters | China Daily | Updated: 2016-12-02 07:44

Travelling through Dali with a leg of ham

Traditionally hand-cured ham hung outside a wooden house in Jianchuan county, Dali prefecture. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Like author Zhang Mei, I am fascinated by Chief Li, the ethnic Bai leader of the Stone Dragon Village. It's a tiny place, with about a thousand folks tucked into the mountains near Dali in Yunnan province.

Chief Li's position suggests he's a small-town bureaucrat, but as I read Zhang's new book, Travels Through Dali With a Leg of Ham, a different picture emerges. Chief Li sees himself in charge not of a place or its people, but its music. He tells Zhang, and clearly anyone else who asks, that he is known as the "Folk Music King".

Zhang is on a tour as literal as the title of her book: In the first chapter, she procures a leg of the traditionally hand-cured ham that she remembers from her childhood in Dali. Fifty pages and a few recipes later, she and three colleagues arrive in Jianchuan county eager to share the ham with local cheese makers, the "pickle lady" of Weishan, a Spanish chef at a Dali farm restaurant, and regionally known folksingers like Chief Li.

First, Chief Li yields the stage-the concrete yard of the government office-to energetic young singers and dancers of the village. But soon he fetches a colorful waistcoat and his guitar, and sings a song about love. "His vocal chords let loose," Zhang writes, "revealing a rich, gravelly voice imbued with sadness, wisdom and romance. The façade of government formality disappears."

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