Bai Raosanling (Three-Temples Circuit)

The Bai raosanling, called "guanshanglan" in the Bai language, is a traditional folk festival circulating among the Bai villages around Cangshan mountain and Erhai lake, with more than a thousand years of history. It weaves together religious worship, spring outing and mass song-and-dance into the most representative folk carnival of the Bai, and entered the first national ICH list in 2006.

Each year on the twenty-third to twenty-fifth of the fourth lunar month, Bai folk of all ages dress in their finest and form village teams called "fu," led by two "tree-bearing elders" wielding willow branches and yak tails, processing over three days in song and dance among the patron-god temples and old shrines between Cangshan and Erhai, singing antiphonal songs, wielding the tyrant-king whip and dancing the eight-corner drum in scenes of fierce joy.

Raosanling carries the primal form of Bai patron-god worship and ancient communal sacrifice, an important living sample for the study of Bai folk belief, song-and-dance art and social organisation, hailed as a "living fossil" of Bai culture.

Held in the fourth lunar month, processing among Xizhou, Qingdongzhuang and Heyicheng between Cangshan and Erhai in Dali.