Duan Siping

Duan Siping (893-944) founded the Dali Kingdom in 937 and ruled as its first king. In Benzhuism, the indigenous patron-god religion of the Bai people of the Dali region, he is enshrined as the benzhu of the Duan family's home village at Qingdong near Xizhou, one of the deified rulers and ancestors whose worship knits each village to its history. A Ming-era legend made him the son of Baijie Amei, a maiden born from a plum who conceived him after touching a dragon, a motif that lent the founder of Dali divine paternity while giving his mother her own miraculous origin.

Parentage

• Baijie Shengfei

Domains

• kingship founding
• village protection

Powers

• to guard his ancestral village and its harvests from sickness and disaster

Epithets

• 太祖

Relations

• descendant of: Duan Zongbang, the Central Benzhu

Sources

• Megan Bryson, Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).
• C. P. FitzGerald, The Tower of Five Glories: A Study of the Min Chia of Ta Li, Yunnan (London: The Cresset Press, 1941).