Shangri-la is officially found!

THOUGH OFFICIAL CAN BE A TRICKY THING

The hell with mystery, romance & myth. Shangri-La is officially real!

Forget ancient maps, decaying centuries-old scriptures, wise Shamans in decrypted temples, and Indiana Jones-styled adventurers closing rotten deals in dark speakeasies. Ignore history and the inconvenient fact that the whole name was made up less than 80 years ago in a forgettable utopian novel called “Lost Horizons”. The book has died long ago. The fortunes of Shangri-La, however, took a whole different twist.

Shangri-La, not the hotel

But first – and to set the record straight – I took this picture in Shangri-La. No kidding. Inside Song Zan Lin temple – to be exact. A large and very impressive Tibetan monastery complex modeled after the Potala Palace in Lhasa. I was touring the place and gradually drove deeper into its inner alleyways. I wanted to discover the life and routine of the monks living inside. When I finally turned back to leave I saw this wooden gate leading from the residence quarters back to the main square. The whole thing just “looked right” and I snapped (a photo).

If you ever thought of Shangri-La as some sort of a tropical paradise, well, you thought wrong. Just look at the picture. It was a cold early April day, when we arrived at the massive front gates of the temple. Erected atop a high plateau, some 3,300 meters above sea level the place seems nothing like a resort. Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen but I can swear by the names all Buddha’s incarnations it was sunny with few flakes of snow. Don’t ask me how this could be at all possible. We laboriously climbed the 300 steps leading to the top gate only to find ourselves easily overtaken by small kids and their wrinkled grannies. I guess you get acclimatized to the thin air and lack of oxygen after having spent a lifetime living in one of the surrounding villages.

Was it worth the effort?

You betcha! Some highbrow snobs may sniff at Song Zan Lin as nothing more than a rip-off of the real thing in Lhasa. I can only wish all rip-offs were this genuine and authentic. Besides, Lhasa was Some 1,600 km (1,000 mi) of semi-paved roads to the west and .

So what’s the connection of this place to Shangri-La? Well, I hate to say this, but the place is officially Shangri-La because…   …err, I guess there’s no good way of putting it… well, because it bought the rights for that name from the Chinese government!

Yes, money, lawyers, the whole shebang.

In 2001 the Chinese government decided to auction the name Shangri-La to the highest bidder. The folks of Zhong Dien – a forgotten shantytown somewhere high on the Southwestern edges of the Tibetan Plateau -decided to bid for it, and won!

It got the name, and it got masses of suckers – like us – rushing in to say they have officially been to Shangri-La. The fact that this is both technically true and yet totally meaningless is indeed quite ironic.

And if this whole story sounds too bizarre to be true, just search for it in Google Maps.