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Mature Flâneur
A Hike in Shangri-La
A surprise awaits atop a mountain in Tibet
Is Shangri-La a real place? James Hilton’s bestselling novel by that name is a completely fictional tale of a remote mountain paradise in Tibet where people never age and wisdom flourishes. So, you may be astonished, as I was, to find there is a town named “Shangri-La” in the eastern Tibetan mountains of Kham (now within China’s Yunnan Province).
This place is actually called Gyalthang in Tibetan, but the Chinese renamed it “Shangri-La” in 2001 in order to create a lucrative tourism industry that draws thousands of Chinese tourists eager to visit an exotic and idealized version of occupied Tibet. (The Chinese military invaded and conquered the then-independent Kingdom of Tibet in 1950 and incorporated it into the People’s Republic of China in 1951).
Not many foreigners visit this ersatz Shangri-La, but I found my way there in 2013. Back in the 1980s, I had hiked some pretty wild places in Tibet (read about it here). The mountains of Tibet move me like no other place on earth. So, when I found myself heading back to the Himalayas for an unusual gig as a TV quiz show host…
