Dali Kingdom

The Dali Kingdom ruled Yunnan and its borderlands for three centuries from its capital at Yangjumie by Erhai Lake. In 937 the military governor Duan Siping, allied with thirty-seven eastern tribes, overthrew the short-lived Dayining regime and took the dynastic name Dali. The new state held the rich valleys between Tibet, Burma and Sichuan, commanding the horse and tea routes that crossed the mountains in every direction. Its kings patronised Buddhism so lavishly that the court chronicles read like temple records: pagodas rose above the lake plain, monk-officials sat in council, and several rulers ended their reigns by abdicating into monasteries. Power gradually slid to the Gao family of ministers, whose head Gao Shengtai seized the throne outright in 1094, only for his deathbed restoration of the Duan house in 1096 to preserve the dynasty's name. Dali survived the fall of its great neighbours, Song and Western Xia, by staying out of their wars and paying careful court to whoever held the north. The reckoning came with the Mongols: in 1253 Kublai, acting for his brother Möngke, marched three columns into Yunnan and took the capital. The Duan kings submitted and were retained as hereditary governors of Yunnan, so that Dali's administration outlived its independence by more than a century, until the Ming absorbed the province in 1382.