Shangri-La: the dream that became a reality
In the heart of 'olde' China,
locals are busy giving everything a facelift. Have they managed to create the
best of both worlds? Jeremy Atiyah finds out
Published: 30 January 2005
You might think of Yunnan Province as the Dordogne of China, with its
pleasant weather, rustic landscapes, picturesquely dressed minority peoples,
and quaint old towns. But in consequence, the tourists are now coming. And boy,
are they coming - affluent Chinese urbanites by the thousand. Some come on
package tours, others come independently. Huge crowds of camera-clicking
tourists zoom in on every spot of cultural or natural interest. The
"old" quarter of every town is a maelstrom of boutique shops and
open-air restaurants.
China has been
only too happy to promote internal tourism. Domestic air travel has increased
exponentially and already resembles that of
Europe or
the
US. On the
ground, comfortable buses with on-board hostesses and computer- reserved seats
cruise the highways. Local tourists reserve hotel rooms on their Wap-enabled
mobiles, or leaf through locally published guidebooks, receiving confirmations
of their bookings as text messages.
And here I am trailing along behind, looking for ancient Eastern wisdom,
though I am glad to note the analogy with the
Dordogne
breaking down when I consult a map.
Yunnan
is actually larger than
Germany,
and stretches from the tropical jungles of
Burma,
Laos and
Vietnam
to the wintry fringes of
Tibet.
So far I've been doing the regular tourist stuff, beside everyone else. I've
been in the regional capital,
Kunming,
which already resembles
Chicago.
I've been to scenic, sunny Dali, where western backpackers have been coming for
years to drink cappuccino and eat spaghetti.
Mainly, though, I've been in Lijiang, which has become one of the great
tourism phenomena of the world. If you wanted to be negative about Lijiang,
you'd complain that it was a faked-up Disneyfied version of Olde
China.
But the town is also immaculately clean and immensely picturesque. Free of
cars, it has cobbled streets, rushing waterways, ancient stone bridges, outdoor
cafés and tiled rooftops, all overlooked by snowy mountains and sunny skies. In
short, it resembles some perfectly quaint Tuscan hill town, complete with
thousands of tourists everywhere.
I stayed in a rickety old wooden house built round a pair of courtyards
packed with potted plants and ancient bonsai trees. It was someone's private
home; one of many such inns where an old man and his wife will take care of
your every comfort. The only sound I could hear from my room was that of
cheeping birds. For all this I paid about £4 a night. Sophisticated home-cooked
dinners cost 70p extra, with large bottles of excellent cold beer at 20p.
It is tempting to stay in Lijiang for ever, but I still have a final
frontier to probe. The end of
Yunnan
is where I'm heading, by bus: to a small town, north of Lijiang, 12,000 feet up
in the Tibetan borderlands. When I disembark here, several hours later, a
serious frost is in the air. This feels like
Tibet
all right. The local people are ruddy-cheeked Tibetans. Distant Tibetan
mountains ring the valley. Tibetan yaks amble on street corners. A Tibetan
monastery commands the heights on the edge of town.
It doesn't look like a town where I'd find ancient wisdom, let alone an
international hotel, but strangely enough, I'm booked into one. The Banyan Tree
chain, owner of properties in countries not known for their frosts, including
Malaysia
and
Thailand,
has decided to test the waters in chilly upland
China.
So here I now am, in a room decked out with silk cushions, low beds, bespoke
dark-wood furniture and tent-like fabrics hanging from the ceiling. The air is
cold but the duvets are enormous, the electric blanket is toasty, the food is
delicious, the service is charming, and the restaurant has a crackling
fireplace.
But where exactly is this? A few years ago the local authorities had the big
idea of renaming it to raise its profile as a tourist destination. If there is
one thing I wouldn't have done, it would have been to give this town a new
name. It already had two - Diqing (the original Chinese name) and Zhongdian
(the Chinese rendering of the Tibetan name, Gyalthang). And now it has a third:
Xianggelila (Chinese for Shangri-La). Which brings me to the British writer
James Hilton.
In his 1930s novel, Lost Horizon, Hilton depicted Shangri-La as a valley
hidden in the wilds of
Tibet,
where time moved so slowly that people could survive for centuries, steeping
themselves in high art and culture. Hilton seems to have got the name from
"Shambhala", a mythical haven for the enlightened, referred to in
ancient Tibetan texts. His idea was that Shangri-La would eventually be called
upon to re-seed human civilisation, after the rest of the world had destroyed
itself by war.
The local authorities of the town to which I must now refer as
"Shangri-La" may have identified their valley as the source of
Hilton's story, but I fear that the mountains are too distant, and that the
land is too brown and dusty. The other implausibility about this latter-day
Shangri-La is that it is far too accessible. Look at me. I've just cruised up
here on public transport. Daily flights land here. A huge economic boom,
moreover, has caused a new Chinese town to spring up on its outskirts, packed
with fashion shops, hairdressing salons, music stores, mobile-phone emporia and
internet cafés. Three or four large hotels, oddly reminiscent of
Las
Vegas, have also appeared. Everyone you speak to
admits that the place is no longer the Shangri-La that it once was.
Might not some mistake have been made in promoting a place as a peaceful
haven, when the desired consequence of that promotion would be to lure large,
noisy crowds to descend upon it?
Few of the locals seem to think so. Right now, the "old town" is
undergoing a huge facelift. Everywhere I hear the sounds of hammering and
chiselling from the interiors of fabulous Tibetan houses - stout structures
with massive walls of stone and ornamental carved wood, fronted by mighty columns
to support the upper floors. Work started a few months ago; the town should be
ready, as good as new, in time for this summer's tourist invasion.
Not that I'm wholly disheartened. What impresses me is how affluent people
from
Guangzhou and
Shanghai
have come to Shangri-La to renovate these old houses and to convert them into
mellow little cafés. They represent the vanguard of
China's
new bohemia. Meanwhile, the local Tibetans, lucky them, get to live in modern
apartment blocks on the edge of the new town.
The more time I spend here, the more fascinated I become.
Tibet
is the borderland between the old world and the new. It is also a borderland
between
China
and
India. My
guide is Tibetan, but grew up in
India,
before returning with his family to
China
a couple of years ago. He speaks good English, Hindi, Tibetan and Chinese. He
and his friends have introduced cricket to Shangri-La. His boss, born to
Bengali parents in
Uganda,
moved to the
Sudan,
studied in
India,
worked in
Nepal
and finally drifted here. These are the kinds of people you find on the fringes
of modern
Tibet.
And what will happen to Shangri-La when Lijiang's tourist hordes arrive?
Perhaps it will keep moving, until the tourists can penetrate no further.
I am still restless, in search of
Yunnan's
uttermost end. I hire a car and driver for two days, to make the trip north to
Deqen. The driver brings his girlfriend, who, apart from visiting Lijiang (125
miles away), has never been anywhere in her life. She is car-sick within an
hour of our departure.
The road from Shangri-La to Deqen is one of those incredible scenic mountain
routes that you cannot imagine anyone bothering to build. It zigzags up and
down near-vertical slopes surrounded by massive snowy mountains. We have lunch
by the upper reaches of the
Yangtze River in a sunny
valley surrounded by orange trees; two hours later we are crossing a 13,000ft
pass in bitter cold. The villages here are all Tibetan - full of grazing cows,
nibbling goats, rootling pigs, pecking chickens, and magnificent peasant
cottages of whitewashed walls, gorgeous painted window frames, and carved
eaves. Houses like these in
Tuscany,
I reflect, would sell for millions.
We finally reach a cold little road on a cliff-top directly overlooking the
Meilixue Shan mountain range, where 13 peaks soar to 20,000ft or more. It's de
rigueur among
China's
new tourists to stay here and watch the sun rise over the mountains. In the
evening, I find a trendy café playing western pop music and serving curry. My
driver and his girl read old copies of the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan and
listen to the music and feel an unfamiliar yearning for the rest of the world.
In my hotel, the temperature in the room falls to freezing in the morning, and
I am forced to wash in water from a thermos flask. But it is all worth it.
Before dawn, I get up to watch the mighty peaks turn pink. Then we drive down
into the deep valley of the upper
Mekong, along a road
with a 2,000ft vertical drop to the river. On the other side of the valley, it
will be my task to walk up to the glacier of
Mount
Kagebo, which is
Tibet's
second holiest mountain.
My driver and his girl stay down below while I set off on the trek. The
proper Tibetan pilgrimage is to walk around the mountain, spending 20 or 30
days over it. An Indian woman I met in Shangri-La told me how she had done
this, walking alone through snowy wildernesses, falling ill, only to be rescued
by passing lamas, who took her to a remote and unknown monastery to recover her
health, leading prayers for her day and night. Compared with that, this
touristic pilgrimage - up to the glacier and back - feels rather trivial. But
the Chinese tourists help me to restore my pride. They all ride mules, while I
walk. In fact, I only just make it, unaccustomed as I am to the altitude (nearly
12,000 feet). Here is the glacier, groaning and creaking in a colossal swathe
down the mountain.
My big spiritual moment occurs on the return journey, when I fall in with a
Tibetan family. Here is an old gentleman and his wife, and their grown-up children,
splendidly dressed and smelling of yak-butter. They scurry like mountain goats
down through the forest. Somehow, they encourage me to follow them along
invisible short cuts. They keep offering to carry my bag. They seem to be
asking me for money, but when I offer it, they look at me as if I am mad - all
they want is a picture of the Dalai Lama. Anyway, we keep going, and as we go,
I fall into a kind of rhythm, my head empties and my spirits rise and I tell
myself I am half-way to finding Buddhism.
Jeremy Atiyah is a co-author of 'The Rough Guide to China'
(£17.99).
GIVE ME THE FACTS
How to get there
Jeremy Atiyah flew from
London
to
Shanghai as a guest of Virgin
Atlantic (0870 380 2007;
www.virgin-alantic.com)
which offers return fares from about £390. He flew from
Shanghai
to
Kunming return as a guest of
Opodo (0870 241 7051;
www.opodo.com),
which can book flights and accommodation across
China.
It offers return flights from
London
to
Kunming from £252 return with
Shanghai Airlines.
Where to stay
He stayed in Shangri-la as a guest of the Gyalthang Dzong Hotel (00 86 887
822 3646;
www.coloursofangsana.com/gyalthang).
The hotel reopens on
28 February 2005.
Double rooms cost US$135 (£70) per night with breakfast and a two-hour massage.
Minimum stay is two nights. Contact Banyan for reservations (01494 675636)
Further information
Contact the China National Tourist Office (0900 160 0188;
www.cnta.gov.cn). Tourist visas,
which are valid for three months, are required. Contact Chinese Embassy Visa
Information (0900 188 0808).
