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 title has been won by a small Tibetan plateau town called Zhongdian (中甸).
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. A fictional place had been made real by administrative decree.
Shortly after, tourists arrived in the millions.
Shangri-La: A Name That Built an Industry
Diqing Prefecture, Yunnan — Total visitor arrivals (millions)
Data note: All figures are from official Diqing Bureau of Statistics and Diqing Culture & Tourism Bureau records. The series begins at 2002 — this is the earliest year in the Diqing Statistics Bureau's published domestic visitor dataset; no official figure for 2000 or 2001 is available in disaggregated public records. The 2025 figure (33.47m) covers January–November only, per a November 2024 government press conference.
