What's in a name?

Once we had finished our three-mile trek along the gorge, we piled back onto our bus and headed for Shangri-La, or Zhongdian, to use one of the town/county's Chinese names. The newer Chinese name is Xiang-ge-li-la, which is a phonetic transliteration of Shangri-La.

You're probably familiar with the term "Shangri-La" and what it connotes, if not its actual derivation. For those of you not up on 1930s novels, James Hilton gets the credit. Whether Hilton actually had a specific place in mind, or whether it's completely fictitious, is up for deabte. A number of places in the Himalayan region (India and Nepal as well as other parts of China) claim to be the setting for his novel, but as far as I'm aware, this one in Yunnan was the only one to take the step of changing its name, presumably to boost tourism.

It seems to have worked. For a small town in the middle of nowhere, there are an impressive number of tour buses, conventioneers, and Western-oriented hiking-gear stores. Part of this is probably due to its location on the Lhasa-Kunming road and the proximity of excellent extreme-sports activity locales, but I doubt that most of the other similarly-sized towns have five-star hotels in addition to the budget hostels.

In retrospect, I wonder how much of the tourist traffic I witnessed was due to the current ban on tourist travel to Tibet. Zhongdian is part of Yunnan province, not Tibet, but is ethnically majority-Tibetan, so groups denied entry to that province but still jonesing for a glimpse of Tibetan culture may have decamped here.