Origins of Shangri-La

The tale of an earthly paradise is among the most enduring myths in the world. From Sumerian epic to the 'islands of the blest' in Celtic literature, it has been a recurring theme through many bodies of literature and for thousands of years. Not surprisingly, then, modern people have also been drawn to the dream of a lost paradise where the ravages of time and history have been held back, where human beings live in harmony with nature, and where the wisdom of the planet is saved for future generations. In other words, to a Shangri-La.

The story of Shangri-La itself is a modern one, told by the English novelist James Hilton in his novel Lost Horizon (1933). Set in the troubled years before World War Two, the book tells of a community in a lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan lamas), in the lost Tibetan valley of Shangri-La, cut off from the world and from time. All the wisdom of the human race is contained in this place, in the cultural treasures stored, and in the minds of the people who have gathered here in the face of an imminent catastrophe.

Hilton's tale struck a chord. The book enjoyed great popularity, and even the retreat of the US president at Camp David was called Shangri-La, after the paradise described in it. And when the novel was turned into a Hollywood movie by Frank Capra, it was an instant success. These days, the name is part of the language, used everywhere from Nepali airlines and Chinese hotel chains to holiday cottages in Florida and Torquay.

Lost Horizon was a tale for its times. In the increasingly pessimistic 1930s, when Western civilisation seemed bent on a path to self-destruction - and when, as Carl Jung put it, 'the smell of burning was in the air' - the story of a kind of earthly paradise had an irresistible appeal. And Tibet in the 1930s was still a land of mystery, one of the last unmapped places, a forbidden and insular country. Nowadays, of course, the choice of the location of the tale seems all the more poignant, given what happened in Tibet some years after the book was published, with the Chinese invasion of 1949, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Tale of 'Lost Horizon'

Mt Kailash, the most sacred mountain in Tibet - travellers must pass it to reach the ancient Gu-ge Kingdom © In the novel, a group of Westerners is rescued by plane from war and chaos in Central Asia, only to crash-land in a remote valley surrounded by the highest mountains in the world. The location of the fictional lost valley is never precisely pinpointed, but on its last fateful flight the plane appears to be heading northeast from Afghanistan across the Karakorum mountains, part of the Himalayan range, and Hilton clearly imagined that it landed somewhere in the then unexplored far west of Tibet.

He tells us that in the valley there was a lamasery, headed by a 200-year-old Capuchin lama. It was a repository of all the cultural treasures of the planet, and its inhabitants were opposed to all violence and materialism. This lamasery stood in the shadow of a magnificent white mountain, 'the loveliest mountain on earth... an almost perfect cone of snow, a dazzling pyramid so radiant, so serenely poised that it scarcely seemed to be real'.

But on what older tale was this exotic story based? Did Hilton have an actual place in mind? Was there indeed a real Shangri-La? And why does the myth of an earthly paradise seem to have such a hold on the human imagination?

Дата добавления: 2015-07-26