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| Utopia's Price: A Chinese tourist drinks from a fountain, one of the few free facilities in Shangri-La. Peter Ford |
It's paradise lost as tourists flock to Shangri-La
Officially named in 2001, this small town in China's Yunnan Province is struggling to cope with over 2 million visitors a year.
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 29, 2007 edition
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Shangri-La, China - For decades, this town's name has evoked an earthly idyll, where wisdom, love, and peace reigned in a hidden mountain valley.
Talk about paradise lost; Shangri-La is getting a beltway.
Struggling to cope with over 2 million visitors a year, the town that claims to have inspired mythical accounts of heaven on earth is in danger of becoming a high-altitude hell, choked by tour buses and overwhelmed by outsiders. Even the man who claims to have first sown the seed of an idea that led to the town changing its name five years ago says he rues the day he voiced it.
"I remember it as a heavenly place," Tibetan musical entrepreneur and local cultural icon Xuan Ke says of his birthplace. Living simply beneath the eternally snowy peaks of jagged mountains, "the people were very honest, kind-hearted, and rustic," he says. "Now they have completely changed. The original spirit has disappeared."
In the 1933 bestseller "Lost Horizon," by James Hilton, Shangri-La is a secret and idyllic spot near the Himalayas. Many regions have claimed to be the inspiration for the imagined abode of the blessed, but China's government officially endorsed the town then known as Zhongdian, in Yunnan Province, in 2001.
Ever since, the authorities in this town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau "have tried to build Shangri-La's tourist brand," explains Ren Jianhua, deputy director of the region's tourism office. "We want to present it to the whole world."
Within five years, Mr. Ren expects 5 million visitors to Shangri-La and its surrounding mountains annually, many brought here on direct flights from Beijing and Shanghai that he says will soon begin operation. Beyond that, "we have set no limits on how many tourists come here," he adds. "The more the better."
That approach has transformed a small village of wooden homes tucked along muddy lanes into a town covering 12 square miles and boasting more than 100 hotels. The so-called "old town" is not old at all: only one house has not been completely torn down and rebuilt in the past few years, residents say.
The new buildings are in the Tibetan style, made of wood, with imposing tree-trunk pillars supporting balconies and overhanging eaves. They are not homes, though, but shops selling jewelry, combed yak tails, yak bone combs, leather bags, and woven textiles. Over this emasculated replica of the yak-herders' village towers a 60-foot-high golden prayer wheel, a monument to kitsch.
"I was not very impressed by the old town of Shangri-La, because the Tibetan characteristics were not very obvious," says Zhang Weiming, a tourist from Kunming, the regional capital. Udo Schenk, from Germany, is blunter. "This is not heaven on earth," he scoffs. "This is a tourist trap."
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