Architectural Painting (Bai Folk House Painting)

Bai folk-house painting is current around Dali and forms an important part of Bai culture, rich in meaning, exacting in form and simple yet dignified. It blends cultural elements of the Han and other peoples, Bai craftsmen having absorbed mainland architectural painting and wed it to their own aesthetics to shape the distinctive "three-buildings-and-one-screen" and "four-wings-five-courts" decorative style; it entered the second national ICH list in 2008.

Bai folk-house painting chiefly takes three forms—ink-wash, coloured painting and clay relief—used not only on shrines, temples and grand old buildings but widely on the screen walls, gables, eaves and doors of ordinary houses. After a new house is finished a painter is called to decorate it with landscapes, flowers and birds, historical tales, verses and auspicious motifs, drawn in ink and filled with mineral pigments that endure for generations.

Uniting architecture, painting, verse and folklore, Bai folk-house painting is the indispensable soul of the "three-buildings-and-one-screen" house, holding real value for the study of southwestern ethnic architecture and the meeting of Han and Bai cultures.

Typical painting can be seen on the screen walls and gables of Bai courtyard houses in Dali old town and Xizhou old town, such as the Yan family mansion.