Shangri-La

The plateau around the town has been Tibetan country for over a thousand years; the Tibetan name of the place, Gyalthang, means royal plain, and it lay on the eastern edge of the Tibetan world where the tea-horse caravan routes from Yunnan climbed towards Lhasa. Caravans carrying brick tea from the Pu'er region north and horses south passed through for centuries, and the town's old quarter, Dukezong, is some 1,300 years old. Its Tibetan name means white stone city and is taken to evoke a city of moonlight.

In 1679 the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery was founded under the authority of the Fifth Dalai Lama and became the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Yunnan, home to hundreds of monks. Qing administrators knew the town as Zhongdian, and it remained a remote county seat under the Republic. The region came under the People's Republic in 1950, and Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture was created in 1957 with Zhongdian as its capital. The monastery was badly damaged in the 1960s and rebuilt from the 1980s.

In 2001 the county was renamed Shangri-La, after the hidden Himalayan valley of James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, a marketing decision that beat rival claims from other towns and turned a quiet county into a tourist destination. A road from Lijiang, an airport, and the opening of Pudacuo, the first reserve in China to meet IUCN standards, in 2007 brought steadily growing numbers. In January 2014 a fire destroyed about half of Dukezong's wooden old town; it was rebuilt over the following years in traditional style, and in 2023 a railway from Lijiang linked the town to the national network.

Shangri-La is one of the Tibetan towns most easily reached by travellers, and Tibetan Buddhism shapes its calendar. Pilgrims circle the monastery and the prayer-wheel hill above the old town, prayer flags cover the passes and hilltops, and the monastery's winter festival of masked cham dances draws families from the valleys in their best clothes. Yet the area is mixed: Khampa Tibetans live in the north of the county and Naxi in the south, Han Chinese live throughout, and the wider prefecture includes a Lisu autonomous county.

The town is known for its horse-racing festival in early summer, when riders compete and families camp in tents on the racing meadow, and for the dancing that fills the old town square every evening, which draws locals of all ages and welcomes anyone who joins in. Crafts include black pottery from the village of Nixi, a tradition at least 2,000 years old, Tibetan jewellery and Yi lacquerware.

Manners are relaxed but religious courtesy matters. Clockwise is the rule for walking around anything sacred. Hospitality is generous and formal: butter tea, barley wine and tsampa are offered to guests, and refusing outright can offend. The town's identity, as its new name admits, is partly a performance for visitors, while Tibetan family life goes on in the farmhouses of the villages around.

About 186,000 people live in the city's whole county-level area, which covers a large stretch of plateau and valleys; the town itself is a fraction of that, and Diqing prefecture as a whole has fewer than half a million residents. Tourism is the engine of the town's economy, with hotels, guesthouses, drivers, guides and shops, and it is matched by farming and herding and by the collection of matsutake mushrooms, a registered local speciality, and of medicinal plants.

Most townspeople live in the new town's apartment blocks and in Tibetan-style houses — thick walls, carved and painted window frames, a ground floor once used for animals — in the villages on the plain. Life follows the farming and religious calendar more than the clock: early mornings around the monastery, a market and shopping in the new town, animals brought in at dusk, and the square dancing in the evening. Winter is the slow season.

The issues people discuss are the dependence on tourism and its seasonal swings, the balance between the restored old town and the commercial feel it has taken on since the fire, land and housing pressure from new building, and the cost and difficulty of moving to the lowlands for education and work. Altitude and distance make health care and schooling harder than in central Yunnan.

The food is Tibetan plateau cooking with Yunnan additions. Yak is the staple meat, served as a hotpot of yak and vegetables boiled at the table, as dried jerky, and as grilled or stir-fried yak with chilli. Butter tea, suyou cha, made from brick tea churned with yak butter and salt, is the daily drink, and tsampa, roasted barley flour kneaded with tea into a dough, is the traditional breakfast and travelling food. Yak cheese is made in the town, and yak-cheese dumplings appear on menus aimed at visitors.

Barley wine, qingke jiu, a cloudy, mildly alcoholic brew, is poured for guests and at festivals, and a stronger distilled version is kept for cold nights. Summer brings the matsutake harvest, when the prized mushrooms, songrong, are sliced raw with soy or cooked with chicken and sold at the market and in restaurants across town; China's matsutake come mainly from the north-east and the south-west. Wild mushrooms of many kinds appear in the rainy season.

Lowland Yunnan food is everywhere in the new town: rice noodles for breakfast, Sichuan-style stir-fries and hotpot, and barbecue in the evening. The old town's cafés serve yak burgers and coffee to trekkers heading for the gorge, and Tibetan porridge appears on local menus.