Шангри-Ла: Аңыз бен шындық іздері

Fictional location in the Himalayas
the legendary location

Shangri La is a fictional place in Tibet's Kunlun Mountains, described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by English author James Hilton. Hilton portrays Shangri La as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Khembalung is one of several Utopia beyuls (hidden lands similar to Shangri La) which Tibetan Buddhists believe that Padmasambhava established in the 9th century CE as idyllic, sacred places of refuge for Buddhists during times of strife.

In a 1936 interview for The New York Times, Hilton states that he used "Tibetan material" from the British Museum, particularly the travelogue of two French priests, Évariste Régis Huc and Joseph Gabet, to provide the Tibetan cultural and Buddhist spiritual inspiration for Shangri La. Huc and Gabet travelled a round trip between Beijing and Lhasa in 1844–1846 on a route more than north of Yunnan. Their famous travelogue, first published in French in 1850, went through many editions in many languages. A popular "condensed translation" was published in the United Kingdom in 1928.

Hilton visited the Hunza Valley, located in Gilgit−Baltistan, close to the China–Pakistan border, a few years before Lost Horizon was published; hence it is a popularly believed inspiration for Hilton's physical description of Shangri La. Being an isolated green valley surrounded by mountains, enclosed on the western end of the Himalayas, it closely matches the description in the novel; although in a reversal on the story, due to increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation, inhabitants of the high altitude parts of the valley appear to age quickly. Today various places, such as parts of southern Kham in northwestern Yunnan province, including the tourist destinations of Zhongdian County, claim the title. In 2001, Zhongdian County in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, northwestern Yunnan province, officially renamed to Shangri la. It is known as "香格里拉" (Xiānggélǐlā) in Chinese, "སེམས་ཀྱི་ཉི་ཟླ།" in Tibetan and "ज्ञानगंज" [gyanganj] in India.

American explorers Ted Vaill and Peter Klika visited the Muli area of southern Sichuan Province in 1999, and claimed that the Muli monastery in this remote region was the model for James Hilton's Shangri La, which they thought Hilton learned about from articles on this area in several National Geographic magazines in the late 1920s and early 1930s written by Austrian American explorer Joseph Rock. Vaill completed a film based on their research, "Finding Shangri La", which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. However, Michael McRae unearthed an obscure James Hilton interview from a New York Times gossip column in which he reveals that his cultural inspiration for Shangri La, if it is anywhere, is more than 250 km north of Muli on the route travelled by Huc and Gabet. On 2 December 2010, OPB televised one of Martin Yan's Hidden China episodes, "Life in Shangri La", in which Yan said that "Shangri La" is the actual name of a real town in the hilly and mountainous region in southwestern Yunnan Province, frequented by both Han and Tibetan locals. Martin Yan visited arts and craft shops and local farmers as they harvested crops, and sampled their cuisine. However, this town was not originally named Shangri La, but was renamed so in 2001 to increase tourism. In the "Shangri La" episode of the BBC documentary series In Search of Myths and Heroes, television presenter and historian Michael Wood suggested that the legendary Shangri La might be the abandoned city of Tsaparang, and that its two great temples were once home to the kings of Guge in modern Tibet. The Travel Channel in 2016 aired two episodes of Expedition Unknown that followed host Josh Gates to Lo Manthang, Nepal and its surrounding areas, including the sky caves found there, in search of Shangri La. His findings offer no proof that Shangri La is or was real.