Shangri-La

Greetings from Shangri-La!
I couldn't have said this ten year ago. Because ten years ago Shangri-La was an imaginary la-la-dream-land depicted in James Hilton's 1933 book Lost Horizon, a utopia of snow-clad mountains, gorges, many colourful ethnicities co-existing harmoniously, Tibetan monasteries and happy-happy joy-joy life.

However in 2002 the Chinese government made a unilateral decision that Shangri-La was, in fact, real and in Zhongdian County in Northern Yunnan, close to the border of Tibet - and who am I to disagree with the Chinese government. The County's name was promptly changed to Shangri-La and tourism took off big-time.

To be fair, outwardly they were close to the mark with the decision. Shargri-La county does indeed have great white-clad mountains, gorges (such as Tiger Leaping gorge), lakes and many ethnicities, predominantly Tibetan, but also Ben, Naxi and many others, whose names elude me. It also had a beautiful monastery (photos above), largely but lovingly rebuilt after the cultural revolution, but with most of the original artifacts remaining and a fantastic atmosphere. And yes, the sky was that shade of blue!

Apparently there is a severe shortage of monks to fill all the Buddhist monasteries in China. Becoming a monk is obviously not the best career move in the money-oriented China of today for a single child, who will at some point be responsible for the welfare of his ageing parents. However, temples are good for tourism, so the Chinese government is paying people to dress up as monks nine-to-five to fill the temples and give tourists something to take a photo of.

This close to Tibet religion still seems to have a more active role in society - and also all ethnic minorities are exempt from the one child policy in China, so there may be more sons to go round. Therefore most of the monks strolling around the monastery in Shangri-La are actually monks, but a few of them are policemen dressed as monks, whose job it is to maintain order and, specifically, to see to it that there are no suspiciously large gatherings of people and/or particularly monks. The situation is especially tight here right now, since Tibet only opened three days ago to tourism after being totally shut for over a month due to recent unrest in the region. As China's official English language television channel CCTV9's news tell us: "Tibet was closed to ensure the safety of the tourists travelling in the region." Yerright!

All in all Shangri-La is just about as close to being inTibet as you can be without actually being there. The architecture is clearly Tibetan (and very beautiful), most of the people are Tibetan (and rather beautiful), the cattle is predominantly yak (and very dignified), dogs Tibetan mastiffs (and huge), and the drink of choice is yak butter tea (and apparently vile - I may have to taste this before I leave, but my stomach has been having a hard enough time recently without inflicting unnecessary horrors on it).