It’s Called Shangri-La, But it Won’t Be Paradise for Long
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.18.02 | 12:43 AM ET
What’s in a name? Gobs of tourists, it turns out. To lure travelers with disposable income, authorities in a Chinese town on the Tibetan plateau recently renamed the place Shangri-La. They’re arguing that the town was the basis for the Shangri-La described in James Hilton’s classic novel Lost Horizon. Evidence is sketchy, but no matter. According to the Los Angeles Times’ Henry Chu, who has been filing some great stories from China recently, the tourists are rolling in. In the novel, Hilton wrote that Shangri-La was a place “touched with the mystery that lies at the core of all loveliness.” Writes Chu, “Amid the current fanfare, and the proliferation of hotels and kitsch-filled souvenir shops trading on the Shangri-La name, little of that mystery appears to be left.”
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Jim Benning is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
