Where the plateau meets the Hengduan Mountains
Dali sits right on the seam between the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau and the Hengduan Mountains. The terrain runs high in the northwest and low in the southeast, with a rich mosaic of landforms. West of Mt. Cangshan stretch classic high-mountain gorges; east of it, as far as Xiangyun, the land is mid-mountain steep slopes. The prefecture averages about 2,090 m above sea level.
Mountains: two ranges, nineteen peaks, eighteen streams
The prefecture's ranges belong to the Yunling and Nushan (Salween) systems. Mt. Cangshan stands at the heart of Dali like a majestic screen — the southern terminus of the Yunling Range, made of 19 peaks, almost all above 3,500 m and topped at 4,122 m. Between every two peaks flows a stream — eighteen in all — running east into Erhai Lake. Hence "nineteen peaks and eighteen streams."
The highest point is Mt. Xueban (4,295 m), on the border between Jianchuan County and Lanping in Lijiang; the lowest is Hongqi Dam (730 m) beside the Nujiang River in Yunlong County.
Basins and lakes: a string of pearls on the plateau
Eighteen basins of 1.5 km² or larger add up to 1,871.49 km², about 6.6% of the prefecture, mostly elongated basins arranged in belts. Eight lakes adorn the land: Erhai, Tianchi, Cibi, Xihu (West Lake), Donghu (East Lake), Jianhu, Haixihai and Qinghaihu. Erhai is Yunnan's second-largest inland freshwater lake — its clear shimmering waters earned it the title "Pearl of the Plateau" and the status of a key national scenic area.
A geological volume you can never finish reading
Quaternary mountain-glacier remains lie in the highlands west of Erhai and north of Yongping. Cangshan gave its name to China's last glaciation — the "Dali Glaciation" — and is among Asia's southernmost mountains affected by terminal-Quaternary glaciation.
Structurally, Dali is split by the great Laojunshan–Cangshan–Ailaoshan fault: east of it lies the Yangtze paraplatform, west of it the Tibet–Yunnan geosynclinal fold belt (the "Sanjiang" area). The two meet at the north–south Erhai–Honghe deep fault. The prefecture's rivers belong to four great systems — Jinsha, Lancang (Mekong), Nujiang (Salween) and Honghe (Red River) — with over 160 watercourses spreading feather-like across the land.
Climate: one mountain has four seasons
Low latitude meet high altitude here, producing small annual temperature swings and no sharp seasons — "the air of all four seasons is ever like early spring; cold stops at cool, heat stops at mild." Yet the complex terrain and huge elevation differences carve climate into dramatic vertical layers: hot in the river valleys, warm on the basins, cool on the slopes, cold on the high peaks; temperature falls and rainfall rises with altitude.
Of the "wind, flowers, snow and moon" quartet, the famous Xiaguan wind is a product of the local wind-funnel terrain, while Cangshan snow is the permanent white note on this ever-green plateau.
