Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

I went to Zhongdian, a Tibetan town six hours north of Dali and a good thousand metres higher, to see A.

A new arrival in Zhongdian would be forgiven for thinking that someone had taken a beautiful old town of cobbled alleyeways and traditional timbered Tibetan buildings, and grafted onto it an ugly concrete sprawl of boulevards lined with cheap concrete.

But no – actually the concrete came first. When I came here five years ago the ‘old town’ was a slum of muddy trails and shacks. Mountains, crisp and unobtainable, lay in most directions but the town was gnarly. There were a couple of tourist cafes but there wasn’t much to eat, or buy in the dusty shops. The thing I remember most about it is the schlock horror of the Tibetan butchers, with yak viscera, spinal cords and heads sitting in a storm of flies.

What happened in the interim was, some Chinese marketing genius read Lost Horizon by James Hilton. It’s a novel from the 1930s, in which a gang of colonials have stiff upper lipped adventures in a Tibetan haven called Shangri-La. He invented the term, it is perhaps a corruption of the Tibetan Shangbala.

On basically no evidence whatsoever, this person decided that the secret Buddhist paradise described in the novel – the monastery of Shangri-La in the Valley of the Blue Moon – was, in fact, Zhongdian. It’s much more likely that Hilton was writing about Kailash, a holy mountain a thousand miles away.

Never mind. They changed the name of the town to Shang-ge-li-la, and they built the ‘old town’ pretty much from scratch. And I do mean town – it is an enormous project, there are dozens of cobbled alleyways and the hulking buildings are properly Tibetan, with huge wooden pillars, intricate detailing on the window screens and balconies and thick stone walls.

And each of these brooding mini-fortresses is now a bar, a restaurant, a shop selling combs made from yak bones, a traditional medicine pharmacy stocking caterpillar fungus and dried ants, and so on. They took the old temple and moved it a few hundred metres and built a new, much flashier temple, and nearby is the world’s largest prayer wheel, a gold cone about ten metres high which takes several men to turn it.

It has sort of worked. There are plenty of Chinese tourists here. And there is lots for them to do, with old growth forests and mountains all around, a few monasteries and hot springs, and a glacier up the road. The monastery just outside town must now be one of the richest in China.

In the ‘new town’ the butchers have cleaned up and there are even flashy supermarkets now. But plenty of people are worried about the social and environmental impact of mass tourism on such a scale in a fragile ecosystem.

In one supermarket I saw a good ‘new China’ image: a grisly nomad guy with gold teeth and matted hair, in riding boots and fur hat and fur trimmed yak skin cloak, striding down an aisle of shampoos.

One thing in the supermarket gives cause for optimism that someone, at least, is not just thinking about the fast buck potential. My purchases were put in a bag made of paper – Because plastic bags are non biodegradable and despoil the landscape, they are banned in Shangri-la. What a brilliant idea.