Shangri-La

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This article is about the legendary fictional location. For other uses, see Shangri-La
(disambiguation).
Shangri-La
Lost Horizon location
Creator James Hilton
Genre Novel
Type Valley

Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James
Hilton. Hilton describes Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a
lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become
synonymous with any earthly paradise, and particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia a
permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. In the novel Lost Horizon, the people
who live at Shangri-La are almost immortal, living years beyond the normal lifespan and only
very slowly aging in appearance. The word also evokes the imagery of exoticism of the Orient.
In the ancient Tibetan scriptures, existence of seven such places is mentioned as Nghe-Beyul
Khembalung.[1] Khembalung is one of several beyuls ("hidden lands" similar to Shangri-La)
believed to have been created by Padmasambhava in the 8th century as idyllic, sacred places of
refuge for Buddhists during times of strife (Reinhard 1978).

Some scholars believe that the Shangri-La story owes a literary debt to Shambhala, a mythical
kingdom in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which was sought by Eastern and Western explorers.[2]

Contents
1 Etymology
2 Location
3 In popular culture
o 3.1 In astronomy
o 3.2 Expeditions and locations
o 3.3 In film
o 3.4 In literature
o 3.5 In music
o 3.6 In video games
4 Usage
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links
Etymology
The phrase "Shangri-La" most probably comes from the Tibetan ,"Shang" a district of -
Tsang, north of Tashilhunpo[3]" + , pronounced "ri", "Mountain" = "Shang Mountain" + ,
Mountain Pass, which suggests that the area is accessed to, or is named by, "Shang Mountain
Pass".

Location

Zhongdian in Yunnan

In China, the poet Tao Yuanming of the Jin Dynasty (265420) described a kind of Shangri-La
in his work The Tale of the Peach Blossom Spring (Chinese: ; pinyin: Tohu Yun J).
The story goes that there was a fisherman from Wuling, who came across a beautiful peach
grove, and he discovered happy and content people who lived completely cut off from the
troubles in the outside world since the Qin Dynasty (221207 BCE).[4] In modern China,
Zhongdian county was renamed Xinggll (, Shangri-La in Chinese) in 2001, to
attract tourists. The legendary Kun Lun Mountains () offer another possible place for the
Shangri-La valleys.

A popularly believed physical inspiration for Hilton's Shangri-La is the Hunza Valley in northern
Pakistan, close to the Chinese border, which Hilton visited a few years before Lost Horizon was
published.[5] Being an isolated green valley surrounded by mountains, enclosed on the western
end of the Himalayas, it closely matches the physical description in the novel. The Hunza Valley,
however, lacks Tibetan culture and the Buddhist religion, so could not have been Hilton's
cultural inspiration for Lost Horizon.

The cultural representation of Shangri-La is most often cited to be northwestern Yunnan

Province, China, where National Geographic explorer Joseph Rock lived and traveled during the
1920s and early 1930s and wrote several articles in National Geographic magazine that are
richly illustrated with superb photography. This coincides with the time when James Hilton
would have been writing Lost Horizon, but there is no direct evidence to support this claim. The
evidence points to another set of explorers. In a New York Times interview in 1936, Hilton states
that he used "Tibetan material" from the British Museum, particularly the travelogue of two
French priests, Evariste Regis Huc and Joseph Gabet, to provide the Tibetan cultural and
Buddhist spiritual inspiration for Shangri-La.[6][7] Huc and Gabet travelled a roundtrip between
Beijing and Lhasa in 184446 on a route more than 250 kilometres (160 mi) north of Yunnan.
Their famous travelogue, first published in French in 1850,[8] went through many editions in
many languages.[9] A popular "condensed translation" was published in England in 1928,[10] at
the time that Hilton would have been getting inspired for or even writing Lost Horizon.

Today, various places claim the title, such as parts of southern Kham in northwestern Yunnan
province, including the tourist destinations of Lijiang[citation needed] and Zhongdian. Places like
Sichuan and Tibet also claim the real Shangri-La was in its[where?] territory. In 2001, Tibet
Autonomous Region put forward a proposal that the three regions optimise all Shangri-La
tourism resources and promote them as one. After failed attempts to establish a China Shangri-la
Ecological Tourism Zone in 2002 and 2003, government representatives of Sichuan and Yunnan
provinces and Tibet Autonomous Region signed a declaration of cooperation in 2004. Also in
2001, Zhongdian County in northwestern Yunnan officially renamed itself Shangri-La County.

Another place that has been thought[by whom?] to have inspired the concept of Shangri-La is the
Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon.

American explorers Ted Vaill and Peter Klika visited the Muli area of southern Sichuan Province
in 1999, and claimed that the Muli monastery in this remote region was the model for James
Hilton's Shangri-La, which they thought Hilton learned about from articles on this area in several
National Geographic magazine articles in the late 1920s and early 1930s written by Austrian-
American explorer Joseph Rock.[11] Vaill completed a film based on their research, "Finding
Shangri-La", which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. However, Michael McRae
unearthed an obscure James Hilton interview from a New York Times gossip column where he
reveals his cultural inspiration for Shangri-La and, if it is any place, it is more than 250 km north
of Muli on the route travelled by Huc and Gabet.[6][7]

Between 2002 - 2004 a series of "Searching for Shangri La"by Laurence Brahm, 2004.1 ISBN 7-
04-014160-4 expeditions were led by author and film maker Laurence Brahm in western China
which determined that the Shangri-La mythical location in Hilton's book Lost Horizon was based
on references to northern Yunnan Province from articles published by National Geographic's
first resident explorer Joseph Rock. Shangri La is Hilton's misspelling of Shambhala by
Laurence Brahm published in June, 2008, ISBN 978-7-80228-590-3.

Shambhala is a core concept in Tibetan Buddhism that describes a realm of harmony between
man and nature that is also connected with the Kalachakra or "wheel of time". The Shambhala
ideal is described in detail in the Shambhala Sutra, a historical text written by the Sixth Panchen
Lama (1737-1780) which describes some of the Shambhala locations in Ngari the western
prefecture of Tibet, documented in Brahm's 2004 film expedition Shambhala Sutra.h

On December 2, 2010, OPB televised one of Martin Yan's Hidden China episodes "Life in
Shangri-La", in which Yan said that "Shangri-La" is the actual name of a real town in the hilly
and mountainous region in northwestern Yunnan Province, frequented by both Han and Tibetan
locals. Martin Yan visited arts and craft shops, local farmers as they harvest crops, and sampled
their cuisine.
Television presenter and historian Michael Wood, in the "Shangri-La" episode of the BBC
documentary series In Search of Myths and Heroes, suggests that the legendary Shangri-La is the
abandoned city of Tsaparang in upper Satluj valley, and that its two great temples were once
home to the kings of Guge in modern Tibet.

It is speculated that Sang-la, Chitkul in Sangla valley near the Indo-Tibet Border is Shangri-la.
La in spiti/Kinnauri like in Tibetan is a word for a mountain pass. Kamru Village in Sangla was
the ancient capital of Bushahr which was a Buddhist state until conquered by Gurkhas.

In popular culture
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There are a number of cultural usages of the Shangri-La idea that have developed since 1933 in
the wake of the novel and the film made from it.

In astronomy

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union named the equatorial, dark, low-lying area of
Saturn's moon Titan Shangri-La.[12]

Expeditions and locations

In 1937, Lutcher Stark, a Texas philanthropist, started building his own Shangri-La in Orange,
Texas. His Shangri-La was an azalea garden situated alongside a cypress-tupelo swamp. By
1950, thousands of people were traveling to Orange to visit Shangri-La, and many magazines
published photographs of it. In 1958, a major snowstorm struck east Texas,[13] destroying
thousands of azaleas and closing the garden for 40 years. The garden has recently been renovated
and is now open to the public once again.[14][15][16]

The businessman Harold Nixon Porter established a nature reserve called Shangri-La in Betty's
Bay in South Africa in 1955. The name was changed to Harold Porter National Botanical Garden
when the reserve was bequeathed to the National Botanic Gardens of South Africa in 1959.[17]

In film

California's Ojai Valley was the location for the Frank Capra film Lost Horizon (1937). The
outdoor scenes of the villagers of Shangri-La and a cavorting Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt
were in fact filmed in nearby Sherwood Forest (Westlake Village) and Palm Springs. The
exterior of the grand lamasery was built and later dismantled on the Columbia Ranch in Burbank,
California.[18] However, according to film historian Kendall Miller in the photodocumentary
bonus feature on the Lost Horizon DVD, an aerial shot of Ojai Valley taken from an outlook on
Highway 150 was used to represent the Shangri-La valley.
Glastonbury Festival created an after-hours area within the site called Shangri-La in 2009. It has
evolved over the past three years each with a slightly different theme: In 2009 the socialist utopia
became a dystopian pleasure city run by a corrupt regime. In 2010 the ruling administration was
overthrown and the city was opened up to rebels and chancers to carve out their own little piece
of paradise. The 2011 storyline was pre-apocalyptic the population of Shangri-La prepared to
flee a viral infection before the end of the world. During the festival's fallow year, 2012, the end
of the world took place and in the 2013 theme became the afterlife. Shangri-La was divided
between Shangri-Heaven and Shangri-Hell, combined to form the Shafterlife. In 2014, the two
areas, Heaven and Hell, were themed-based around the perils of the traditional office workplace.
'Shangri- Hell' comprised a collection of self contained buildings all based on the departments of
a corporations head-office. Some were in fact bars and other were display installations for
amusement purposes. [19]

In literature

Eiichi Ikegami wrote a novel titled Shangri-La (2005); an anime adaptation of the novel was
released in 2008.

In music

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The Kinks' album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969) includes the
Ray Davies song "Shangri-La". The song went on to be released as a single in the UK.

The musical Kiss of the Spider Woman by John Kander and Fred Ebb starring Chita Rivera
makes reference to "Shangri-La" in the song "Where You Are"

Led Zeppelin's song "Kashmir" (1975) makes numerous references to the mythical city of
Shangri-La.

"Shangri-La Dee Da" is the fifth studio album by American hard rock band Stone Temple Pilots.

The final track on the Electric Light Orchestra album, A New World Record (1976), called
"Shangri-La", refers to "My Shangri-La" as a state of bliss.

Kim Wilde's fourth studio album, Teases & Dares (1984), contains the track "Shangri-La".

Neil Innes' album Taking Off (1977) includes the track "Shangri-La". The song has been
afterwards reworked as a Beatles pastiche for the Rutles' album "Archaeology" (2001).

Stevie Nicks's sixth studio album is titled Trouble in Shangri-La (2001).

Mark Knopfler's fourth solo album, Shangri-La (2004), contains the track "Our Shangri-La".

Jake Bugg's second album Shangri-La (2013)

Chatmonchy's single "Shangri-La".

Insane Clown Posse's "Forever" makes reference to Shangri-La at the end of the track, the lyrics
go "We just wanna see us all together. After forever, off in Shangri-La."