In the Tang Dynasty, during the Nanzhao period, Bai ancestors built a shrine on the shores of Erhai Lake to honor a mortal who became a god. According to local history, a young man named Duan Chicheng strapped ninety-nine blades to his body, held two swords, and leaped into the belly of a giant python that terrorized the valley. He died killing the beast. The grateful community deified him as the Erhai Dragon King, the protector of their waters.

For over a thousand years, the temple has stood as a physical record of survival. It weathered a devastating earthquake in 1514, rising again under the direction of Prefect Liang Zhu. In 1528, military official Jiang Long added the Haoran Pavilion, where the exiled Ming dynasty poet Yang Shen and local scholar Li Yuanyang drank wine and watched the lake wind whip the waves into white foam. Another earthquake shattered the temple in 1925, prompting yet another reconstruction.

The physical structure tells a story of shifting geography. In the 1930s, anthropologist C.P. Fitzgerald crossed a wooden bridge to reach the temple, which sat on a small island. Today, the water has receded, leaving the temple stranded one hundred meters from the shoreline. The surviving Main Hall, rebuilt in the late Qing Dynasty, features a single-eave gable-and-hip roof supported by a post-and-lintel timber-and-earth frame. It measures exactly 13.7 meters wide and 10.8 meters deep. On the front porch, an incense table covers the Bo Well. Local lore says this deep shaft connects directly to the underwater Dragon Palace, and that builders pulled the temple’s massive wooden pillars directly from its dark waters.

Time and water continue to reshape the site. In 2000, a conservation initiative converted the front fishponds into a harbor, bringing the lake water closer once more. The resulting humidity now slowly rots the ancient wooden columns. Yet, the temple remains a living sanctuary. Every autumn, on the eighth day of the eighth lunar month, villagers gather for the Shuahai Festival. They race decorated flower boats, sing traditional songs, and perform rituals to honor the python-slayer, keeping an ancient covenant alive on the edge of the shrinking lake.