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

Five years ago the ‘old town’ was a slum of muddy trails and shacks. Crisp blue Mountains 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 was the schlock horror of the Tibetan butchers, complete with yak viscera, spinal cords and heads, sitting in a storm of flies.

What happened in the interim was some Chinese marketing guy 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. Hilton invented the term – it is perhaps a corruption of the Tibetan Shangbala.

On basically no evidence whatsoever, it was 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, but never mind that.

In celebration, the name of the town was changed to Shang-ge-li-la, and the ‘old town’ was pretty much built from scratch. And I do mean town – it is an enormous project, the alleyways and the central square are cobbled, and the hulking buildings are properly Tibetan, with huge wooden pillars, intricate detailing on the window screens 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.

The town’s makeover 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.

But plenty of people are worried about the social and environmental impact of mass tourism on such a scale in a fragile ecosystem.

Kevin works for an NGO, putting up basketball courts in the mountains (it’s not as daft as it sounds; the muddy villages benefit from a flat surface to thresh grain and dance on). Kevin is happy to see prosperity arrive, but not about the way it is concentrated in the hands of a few entrepreneurs, many of whom are non resident Han Chinese rather than the area’s native Tibetans. He complains that too often progress is measured in material terms when really it’s a step backward, and cites the example of a Chinese initiative to put solar panels in the villages to heat water. The panels didn’t generate enough heat to boil the water, so didn’t help making it potable. They also came packed with polystyrene chips that the villagers scattered,  and which their pigs and chickens ate and became ill. 

Among Tibetans a social gap has opened up between those who have found a way to benefit from the boom – often as guides or drivers – and those who remain in poverty.

Some who have certainly benefited are from the tour agency Khampa Caravan. Its Tibetan owners attempt to show people more than the ‘Shangri-la’ image, by putting up guests in local houses run as eco-lodges. Their profits are ploughed back into their communities to build schools and medical facilities.
 
It’s worth noting that these people are returned exiles, having spent years in India with the Dalai Lama’s outlawed government. It was there that they received their education and expanded their outlook. It’s unlikely that they could have grown so worldly had they stayed in China, where educational opportunities for Tibetans remain limited.

They are happy for the chance to spread their culture and to improve the local standard of living, but they don’t want their home to turn into another Lijiang. That’s a minority town due south, which has been so prettified, and is so swamped with tourists, that it is commonly compared to Disneyworld. Entire streets are lined with souvenir shops, and the locals feel marginalized.

The Tibetans of Shangri-La express disquiet about being patronized as a picturesque minority people, who live in an apolitical state of oneness with nature, and who supposedly prefer nothing better than dancing around in colourful costumes.

After all, such a presentation ignores a central, inconvenient fact – that Tibetans are a colonized, subject people, not at all as happy under the flag of the People’s Republic as the Chinese authorities, and the Shangri-La myth makers, insist.  

Better to be patronized than starved or brutalized, as happened in the recent past. During the Cultural Revolution, the area was in open civil war, with bands of Tibetan freedom fighters taking on Red Guards sent up from the cities. Lhakpa, a Tibetan driver, mentions to me in an off hand manner that all the men in his family were executed as guerillas in the 1970s.

As with so many things in China, it’s best to shrug and say, at least things are better than they used to be.