One
Shangri-La is vast, with few people. It covers more than 11,000 square kilometers—roughly three-quarters the size of Beijing, or one and a half times Shanghai. But its population is less than 200,000, not even one percent of Beijing or Shanghai. The sky is vast, and the land often lies empty.
This place was once a corner of the Tibetan Kham region. The word Kham (ཁམས་པ།) means “border guards.” This was the edge of agricultural kingdoms and the edge of nomadic empires. So the ancestors of the Khampa people were probably more fierce warriors, which troubled the surrounding Naxi and Bai peoples—they always said the Tibetans were barbaric. Actually, not all Tibetans are like this: among Tibetans, the Khampa are the branch that’s “not very cultured, but good at fighting”—skilled at horseback riding and archery.
In recent years, many people have become fascinated by Khampa men. Tall, dark-skinned, with strong facial features and deep-set eyes; straightforward in character, loyal, daring to act and take responsibility, even somewhat fierce. They possess a different kind of masculine beauty. When I was growing up, I indeed had many uncles and older brothers like this around me. They were also very cheerful, with a kind of rough and wild humor.
To me, the borderland is a place where you can always encounter people who are “not of our kind.” Although there are more Tibetan families, there are also Han, Naxi, Bai, Yi, and Lisu people—all kinds.
Two
My family is an ethnic “friendship association.”
My grandfather’s father was Bai from Dali, from a family near what is now the fashionable ancient town of Shaxi; my grandfather’s mother was Tibetan from Shangri-La, with her ancestral home in what is now Pudacuo National Park—so I still have relatives whose homes are inside the park. Black-necked cranes, green-tailed pheasants, leopards, and musk deer are neighbors, you could say.
My maternal grandfather’s ancestral home was in Yongsheng, Lijiang. He was Dai, with the surname “Hai.” I haven’t figured out the origin of this surname yet, don’t know which year or month his ancestors migrated from further south. My maternal grandmother grew up in Tacheng, between Shangri-La and Lijiang, by the Jinsha River. Her father was a Tibetan lama, her mother was Naxi.
The women in my family have always held considerable authority. My maternal grandfather spoke Dai, Naxi, Chinese, and Tibetan; my maternal grandmother spoke Naxi, Chinese, and Tibetan; they spoke Naxi at home. My paternal grandfather spoke Bai, Chinese, Naxi, Yi, and Tibetan; my paternal grandmother spoke Tibetan and Chinese; they spoke Tibetan at home. As a child, I spent more time with my maternal grandparents, so I learned Naxi first—later, without the environment, I lost most of it.
By my parents’ generation, the languages had simplified: my father spoke Chinese and Tibetan, could understand Naxi; my mother spoke Naxi and Chinese, could understand Tibetan. At home we mainly spoke Chinese.
By the time Max and I came along, we continued the tradition—my Chinese is better than my English, his English is better than his Chinese, so we mostly speak Chinese at home.
Three
When I was little, the town was still very small. Walking in any direction for half an hour, you’d see few signs of human habitation. You’d either see fields of barley or turnips, or snow mountains and grasslands. As children, we liked to push our bicycles, loaded with water bottles and big pots, to streams for barbecues and picnics. Watermelons soaked in the ice-cold water became icy cool too.
When I was little, cattle, sheep, and pigs were everywhere, always appearing in herds. But they were silent and paid no attention to people. People did their thing, and the animals did theirs. People were very kind to animals. The most important thing in Tibetan education is compassion—even mosquitoes aren’t killed casually, because you never know whose reincarnation they might be. Many people rode horses. Our grandest annual celebration was on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. While people in waterway networks race dragon boats, we race horses. This was my favorite festival. Good riders could form human pyramids on galloping horses. Ten people could stand on four horses, all four horses galloping at full speed. We also had competitions for picking up khatas, which was my favorite event. We’d lay khatas one after another on the road, and riders would compete to see who could run fastest while picking up the most khatas. They’d hook only their toes in the stirrups, their entire bodies suspended in air, hands sweeping the ground to scoop up many khatas, then nimbly swing back onto their horses.
When I was little, all the roads that weren’t stone-paved were dirt roads. The ancient town had roads paved with large stones. Many people and horses had left their traces over long years, making the stones smooth and somewhat slippery. I still remember hearing tourists with luggage complaining as they walked through the streets as a child. Because they couldn’t pull their wheeled suitcases. One person said, “The road is so uneven and bumpy, it’ll break the suitcase.” Another replied, “Sigh, such a beautiful place, you really can only come here with a backpack.” This was the first time I heard the term “backpack travel.”
The roads I walked to school were all dirt roads. When a car passed, it raised lots of dust. Every time I left home wearing black little leather shoes, when I returned home, my feet were always covered with a layer of yellow-gray dust. When I was seven, our earthen house was requisitioned. They tore down our earthen house and paved the city’s third asphalt road, which we called Road Number Three. I still remember the first time I smelled tar, seeing the steamroller pressing over small stones mixed with asphalt that hadn’t yet dried. I was terrified.
Four
When I was nine, I saw a piano for the first time. I was captivated. At home, I begged and pleaded with my grandparents. Finally, I wore down my parents’ resolve. They found me a piano teacher. There was only one piano teacher in all of Shangri-La, who was also my father’s music teacher. I studied with this teacher for a year. Then the teacher didn’t know what else to teach me. My parents asked around everywhere, and finally found Teacher Wang in Lijiang city, across the Yangtze River. My parents also wore down Teacher Wang’s resolve. So for the next two years, Teacher Wang drove four and a half hours every weekend to Shangri-La to teach me piano. He’d sleep on our sofa at night and drive back to Lijiang the next day. To make sure Teacher Wang could at least earn back his gas money, my mother called over all her three siblings’ children to learn piano too. Our four families supported Shangri-La’s first piano store.
Lijiang was the “more developed city” near Shangri-La. After my maternal grandparents retired, they settled in Lijiang. So from when I was just a few months old, I frequently traveled between the two places. My mother became another “Mencius’s mother,” moving with me three times in total, all related to my education. The first time was because my grandfather’s health was poor and taking me to kindergarten had become a burden for him, so my mother moved me back to Shangri-La so she could pick me up and drop me off; the second time was for access to better education quality—when I turned eleven and started junior high, my mother moved me back to Lijiang; the third time was when I did well on the high school entrance exam and could attend a provincial key school under the policy for ethnic minorities from border regions—my mother moved me to Kunming’s high-tech district.
Five
And so, I moved farther and farther from my hometown. I ate hometown food less and less.
The food there, city people call “organic.” I don’t understand such fancy terms, I only remember that chicken tasted like chicken, pork tasted like pork, potatoes tasted like potatoes. Later, when I went outside, everything I ate seemed to be missing something.
Later, as China’s logistics became advanced and same-day delivery became common, my greatest comfort was that in summer, my parents would send me a box of mushrooms—this was the “matsutake express” from Shangri-La to Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Matsutake mushrooms picked fresh from mountain forests in the morning would take planes and rush deliveries to reach me in just one day and night.
Opening the foam box and taking a deep breath—it was the wind of home, the scent of the forest.
Thank you for reading this far. I’d like to share with you a piece of “archival footage” I recently found on a DVD—a documentary about Shangri-La filmed in 2007. My family and I appear in a few frames. The scenery, the voices, the very air of that time—watching it now feels like stepping back into that era.
Appendix: About Shangri-La
Shangrila (香格里拉, Xiānggélǐlā; སེམས་ཀྱི་ཉི་ཟླ, Semkyi’nyida; formerly Zhongdian 中甸 in Chinese, and Gyalthang རྒྱལ་ཐང། in Tibetan) is in Yunnan Province.
Historically, this area was part of the old Tibetan province of Kham, but the Qing Dynasty made it administratively part of Yunnan Province in the 18th century. Today, the town is split between Tibetan and ethnic Han residents, as well as a fair smattering of other ethnic minorities: Naxi, Bai, Yi and Lisu, with the surrounding countryside almost entirely Tibetan.
The name “Shangri-La” was invented by James Hilton, author of Lost Horizon (1933), in which four people crash-land in the Himalayas and find themselves in the mysterious valley called Shangri-La, where they encounter a peaceful and ageless community. As they explore this hidden paradise, they grapple with the concept of immortality and the choices they must make about staying or returning to the outside world.
Hilton (who never went to China) located his Shangri-La in the Kunlun mountains which form the border between Tibet and Xinjiang near the southern branch of the old Silk Road. Elements of Hilton’s story were apparently inspired by National Geographic articles about various places in eastern Tibet, written by an American who lived in Lijiang—hence China’s rationale for claiming the name. Some think the name Shangri-La was most likely derived from the word for paradise “Shambala,” by Hilton through exposure to Rock’s writings on the region.
Lost Horizon was then made into a movie by Hollywood director Frank Capra, starring Ronald Colman as the urbane British diplomat of the novel. It’s a movie that was recently restored.
The name Shangri-La has since become a byword for a peaceful paradise, a distant haven; the name of retirement bungalows from Devon to Durban; of hotels and boarding houses promising rest and seclusion in every continent; of an American aircraft carrier. Camp David, the US President’s retreat, was originally called Shangri-La until renamed by Eisenhower for his son, David.
I like to think of Hilton’s typing fingers tapping out the name Shangri-La for the first time in a house on the edge of the Epping Forest, with no suspicion of the effect it would have on global nomenclature.
The history of how this historic Tibetan town (originally called Zhongdian) acquired the name Shangri-La is an interesting story—Amber’s father and his colleagues helped in that story, and you can ask them for more details :)