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The Dali Kingdom was a Buddhist monarchy in which the king's authority was legitimated by Buddhist cosmology rather than the Confucian mandate of heaven. The royal family maintained close ties to the local Buddhist monasteries; several Dali kings abdicated to become monks, relinquishing political power to pursue spiritual achievement.

A fantasy in which the Buddhist legitimacy of the Dali kingship is challenged — in which a faction claims that the current king has lost his karmic merit and the throne should pass to a monastery-trained successor — gives the Buddhist cosmological frame a political application that readers of Chinese fantasy will find both specific and fresh. iWrity connects your Dali fantasy with readers who will appreciate the depth of that legitimacy crisis.

The Dali Kingdom was the political expression of Bai culture, and the Bai people maintained a spirit tradition — the benzhu — that ran parallel to and underneath the Buddhist overlay. Each Bai village had its own benzhu: a local hero or ancestor who had been deified after death, who protected the village, and who received regular offerings and festival celebrations. The benzhu tradition was not Buddhist and not Confucian; it was specifically Bai, and it predated both.

A fantasy in which a Dali king's political decisions are simultaneously evaluated by Buddhist monks and by the benzhu of the affected villages — and in which a conflict between the two evaluation systems creates a crisis that neither can resolve alone — uses Bai religious complexity in a way that no fantasy set in Han China can replicate.

When Kublai Khan's Mongol army arrived at the border of the Dali Kingdom in 1253, the last Dali king made a decision that saved his people at the cost of his dynasty. He sent Kublai a gift of white camels — a gesture of submission — and Kublai accepted the surrender without the massacre that had accompanied other Mongol conquests. The Dali aristocracy was incorporated into the Mongol administrative structure; the kingdom ended, but the people survived.

A fantasy that asks what the king promised in private — what was included in the gift of white camels that history did not record — is a story about the price of survival that Dali's specific history makes possible. iWrity delivers readers who will engage with that question at the depth it deserves.