Shangri-La: Manufacturing Paradise
In 1933, a British novelist named James Hilton invented a place.
He called it Shangri-La — a Himalayan valley of impossible peace, where Tibetan monks lived for centuries and the outside world's noise never arrived.
Lost Horizon became a bestseller. Hollywood made it a film. Franklin Roosevelt named his presidential retreat after it.
The word entered the English language as shorthand for paradise.
Authors
Hilton never went to China.
He wrote the book in four weeks, drawing on National Geographic dispatches filed by Joseph Rock — an Austrian-American botanist who spent 27 years in the mountains of southwest China, filing vivid reports from a world most Westerners had never seen. Rock's photographs and field notes gave Hilton his raw material. Hilton gave the world a myth.
For seventy years, the myth had no fixed address.
But that was about to change.
The Contest
In the mid-1990s, a quiet competition broke out across Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet. Multiple counties, eyeing the tourism potential of Hilton's legacy, began making academic and cultural cases that their valley was the real Shangri-La.
The contest was part scholarship, part 'land grab', and entirely fascinating.
The contestants: Tibet, Zhongdian (Yunnan), and Yaning (Sichuan), each staking a claim to Hilton’s legendary valley.
Yunnan moved fastest.
In 1997, the provincial government announced that the fictional paradise was, in fact, a small Tibetan plateau town called Zhongdian.
Four years later, in December 2001, Beijing made it official: Zhongdian was formally renamed Shangri-La. A county of 160,000 people had acquired one of the most recognized place names in the English language overnight.
A fictional place had been made real by administrative decree.
It worked. Tourists arrived in their millions.
Insert growth chart here.
What You'll See In Paradise
The rebranding could have produced a theme park. In places, it has.
The old town — Dukezong (独克宗古镇), one of the largest surviving Tibetan settlements in Yunnan — was devastated by fire in 2014, rebuilt rapidly, and now carries the slightly too-smooth patina of recent reconstruction.
The prayer wheel at its centre is said to be the world's largest. The lanes are full of guesthouses and yak butter tea served to schedule.
But step past the commercial perimeter and the landscape reasserts itself with force.
At 3,200 metres, the Shangri-La plateau is vast and cold and startling. Pudacuo National Park (普达措国家公园) — one of China's first to meet international standards — protects a terrain of alpine lakes, old-growth forest, and grassland that genuinely earns the word pristine. Songzanlin Monastery (松赞林寺), the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Yunnan, sits above the city like a small fortified city of its own, its golden rooftops catching the high-altitude light in a way that no camera quite resolves.
The surrounding landscape — the Hengduan Mountains (横断山脉), the deep river gorges where the Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween run roughly parallel within 80 kilometres of each other — is among the most dramatic on the continent.
This is the terrain that stopped Confucian moral doctrine from reaching the Mosuo at Lugu Lake, that shaped the Tea Horse Road, that put a natural barrier between lowland China and the Tibetan world.
It does not disappoint.
