In 856 AD, King Qiu Fengyou of the Nanzhao Kingdom ordered the construction of a massive hall in his capital, Yangjumie. This original Wuhua Tower was a wooden colossus. It welcomed regional tribal chieftains and foreign envoys, and housed over a thousand Buddhist scriptures. In 1253, Kublai Khan’s soldiers camped before its gates. Impressed by its scale, the Mongol ruler funded its restoration in 1266.

Fire eventually claimed the Nanzhao structure during the early Ming Dynasty, leaving behind ashes and memories. When builders laid out the new Dali Prefecture City during the Hongwu era, they transferred the beloved name to a new bell and drum tower on a different site. This second tower stood as a community anchor, surviving until local officials raised public funds to rebuild it in 1862.

The twentieth century brought the most dramatic transformation. In 1972, workers demolished the tower. Beneath the floorboards, they made a startling discovery. The 1862 builders had used seventy ancient Song and Yuan dynasty stone tablets, carved with Sanskrit mantras and epitaphs, as raw foundation material. These cold, inscribed stones, now preserved in the Dali City Museum, preserved the voices of medieval Dali.

The tower standing today rose between December 1998 and April 1999, funded by a five-million-yuan government project. It rises twenty meters above Fuxing Road. The nine-meter-tall base consists of heavy, grey Dali stone blocks, split by four arched pedestrian gateways. Above this stone pedestal, three wooden stories feature red pillars, blue-tiled roofs, and upturned flying eaves that catch the mountain wind. Jianchuan woodcarvers spent months chiseling the wooden lattice windows, leaving fine tool marks on the screens. At the very top, a lotus-bud-shaped treasure finial glints in the Yunnan sun. From the upper balconies, visitors look out over the grey-tiled roofs of traditional Bai homes, the peaks of Cangshan Mountain, and the blue waters of Erhai Lake.

The tower remains a physical link to Dali's shifting fortunes, built on the literal and figurative stones of its ancestors.