A cheerful group of Chinese tourists, all from eastern cities, are pushing against an enor- mous Tibetan prayer wheel. On a bus tour of China's wild west, they're having fun trying to get the giant instrument spin- ning. No less than 50 feet tall and 25 feet diameter, the Fortunate Victory Prayer Wheel depicts, in bas-relief, China's 56 ethnic groups working together in fabled harmony. Three maroon-robed monks, shorn and strong, arrive to give a hand. The tourists have been trying to push the prayer wheel counterclockwise-the wrong direction in Tibetan Buddhism. The monks reverse their energy and get the wheel twirling like a gar- gantuan top. Someone's cell phone trills a Chinese pop tune. A woman in lavender tights digs into her oversize purse. A man in a suit reaches into his black leather overcoat. A girl in plaid Converse high-tops rummages in her silver backpack. But it is one of the monks who steps away from the wheel and pulls the gadget from the folds of his robe. He shouts into the phone while star- ing out across the city below. There is the Paradise Hotel, a five-star colos- sus enclosing a swimming pool and an enormous white plas- tic replica of sacred Mount Kawagebo. There, sprawling in all directions, are gray concrete tenements. There, against a far hillside, is the restored 17th-century Ganden Sumtseling Monastery, a smaller but no less inspiring ver- sion of the grand Potala in Tibet, gleaming in the wood-smoke haze like an imaginary palace. Welcome to Shangri-La. A decade ago this was an obscure, one-horse village on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Today, after an extreme makeover, it's one of the hottest tourist towns in China, gateway city to the Three Parallel Rivers World Heri- tage site in northwestern Yunnan Province. Ten years ago the original village was becom- ing a ghost town of derelict buildings and deserted dirt roads. Most residents had moved chalet-like farmhouses with stone walls and out of their traditional homes-commodious magnificent wooden beams-into modern structures with more running water and septic systems. The historic quarter they left behind seemed doomed. Tourism saved the place. The Tibetan farmhouses were suddenly rediscovered as unique, endemic architecture that could turn a profit. Redevelopment began immediately. Water and sewer lines were buried beneath the crooked lanes. Electricity and the Internet were snaked in. The old homes were rebuilt and turned into fancy shops. New shops were constructed in the same style but with baroque facades-ornately carved dragons and swans and tigers-to attract Chinese tourists. Which they did: More than three million tourists, almost 90 percent of them Chinese, visited Shangri-La last year. Take for instance the woman in black leather pants who steps out of a Hummer in the parking lot of the Sumtseling Monastery, hands off her little purse, and climbs up on a wildly decorated yak tended by an elabo- rately costumed Tibetan, sword and all. Her friends snap photos. She could as easily be a tourist mounting a horse in Deadwood, South Dakota, or standing beside a buffalo in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Just as Native American culture has been commodified in the American West, Tibetan culture has been commercialized in China's west. In the old town, high-end shops selling faux Tibetan jewelry, knives, and furs-the spot- ted cat skins are actually dyed dog hides- have replaced the chickens and pigs that once inhabited the ground floors of Shangri- La's homes. At the giant prayer wheel the tourists and monks have tired of the gilded merry- go-round and are leaving, when an elderly Buddhist woman arrives. She's wearing a tra- ditional wool apron, but it is filthy, as if shed walked a great distance and performed many prostrations along her pilgrimage. A fuchsia head scarf is plaited into her graying braids. She is thumbing through 108 prayer beads while repeating in a humming whisper the holy mantra om mani padme hum, a prayer for compassion and enlightenment. The old woman grabs the rail of the giant spindle and, throwing her full weight into this act of devotion, keeps the wheel turning. U nlike other places with mythically reso- nant names, such as Timbuktu or Machu Picchu, Shangri-La never actually existed until now. The name comes from James Hilton's 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, a tale of plane-crash survivors who find their way to a utopian lamasery called Shangri-La in the wastelands of Tibet. In the book the lamasery, founded in the 18th century by a Catholic missionary named Perrault and now administered by a high lama, sits at the base of a mountain called Karakal, a fulgent pyramid of snow and rock. Home to more than 50 monks from nations around the world, all deep in spiritual studies, the lamasery is a grand repository of human- ity's wisdom, embracing the best of both East and West. Midway through the novel readers discover that the high lama is actually Perrault himself. He's more than 200 years old, hav- ing been well preserved by serious study, the immersional serenity of Shangri-La, and isola- tion from a modern world mindlessly drifting toward holocaust. Hilton is said to have taken his inspiration for Shangri-La in part from the writings of the eccentric botanist Joseph Rock, whose tales of exploration and adventure in remote Yunnan, led expeditions in search of exotic plants and unknown cultures. He wrote of sliding over maga- Tibet, and elsewhere appeared in this zine from 1922 to 1935. The irascible Rock the Mekong on a bamboo zip line, of attacks by brigands, of mysterious rituals and meet- ings with kings. Rock's flair for the flamboyant must have captivated Hilton, a British roman- tic who wrote 22 novels, including Good-bye, Mr. Chips. Hilton also drew from another source, one much older than the writings of Joseph Rock. Shangri-La sounds like-and almost cer- tainly is-a thin disguise for Shambhala, the earthly paradise in Tibetan Buddhism where there is no war and no suffering, and where people live in peace and harmony through medita- tion and self-discipline. In Buddhist texts Shambhala is said to reside beyond the Himalaya at the base of a crystal mountain, its inhabitants untouched by the venality and avari- ciousness of the outside world. For Hilton, born in 1900 and witness to the devastation of World War I and the Depression, this alluring East- ern legend would have had powerful appeal. Mix a noveliss imagination with Tibetan mythology, add a dash of Joseph Rock and a generous helping of longing, and you get a nice recipe for Lost Horizon. Although the novel is rarely read today, the word Shangri- La and what it symbolizes-a faraway place of beauty, spiritual replenishment, and supernat- ural longevity -have long been part of world pop culture. Of course the problem with the book is the problem with all utopian narratives: It downplays the negative but no less natural afflictions of humankind, such as jealousy, lust, greed, and ambition. In the end, this makes both the book and its unifying theme, Shangri-La, seem simplistic-precisely the opposite of the modern-day city of Shangri- La, a place that could hardly be more compli- cated or confounding. In its previous incarnation, Shangri-La was Zhongdian, a 10,000-foot-high trade-route town located just east of some of the deepest and most dramatic gorges in the world. Three great rivers-the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Salween, separated by towering mountain ranges and known hereabouts as the Jinsha, the Lancang, and the Nu-all sweep east of the Himalaya, then drop due south in tight parallel formation before pouring off in differ- ent directions. This was the remote region that Rock explored in the 1920s and'30s. But much has changed since then. Large- scale commercial logging began in the 1950s. Roads were gouged into the mountains, and thousands of acres of old- growth forest were clear- cut from the sheer slopes. By the mid-1990s, more than 80 percent of the area's income came from timber operations. Then in 1998, due in part to over- logging of the Jinsha catch- ment, the river flooded. Nearly 4,000 people died, and millions lost their homes. In the response, government banned all commercial Chinese logging in the Three Rivers region. Forced to retool its economy, Zhongdian turned to tourism, capitalizing on its distinc- tive architecture and proximity to stupendous geography. At the time Zhongdian had no airport, and it took two days on a rough road to reach the town from Kunming, the nearest major city. An airport was built in 1999, and the Kunming road was finished a year later. By 2001, revenues from the tourist industry had already surpassed what had once come from logging. That same year, after considerable lobby- ing, canny local officials were given authori- zation from Beijing to rename their town and county Shangri-La-a marketing coup, given how many other savvy villages in Yunnan and Sichuan were vying for the famous appella- tion. The Fortunate Victory Prayer Wheel was erected the next year, and hotels and gift shops began sprouting like the expensive matsutake mushrooms that Tibetans pick in the summer for export to Japan. The crowning tourist-catching achieve- ment came in 2003 when the United Nations officially acknowledged the prodigious biodi- versity of the river gorges and designated the region the Three Parallel Rivers World Heri- tage site. Instantly, Shangri-La became the new hot spot for Chinese travelers willing to pull on hiking boots and experience the fron- tier firsthand. Fed by monsoon storms, the three great rivers have bulldozed staggeringly deep chasms that often exceed 10,000 feet, twice the depth on average of the Grand Canyon. The World Heritage site also embraces more than a hundred peaks higher than 16,000 feet. Because of the stunning verticality, ecosystems can range from subtropical to arctic-like in the space of mere miles. Described by the UN as the "epicenter of Chinese biodiversity," Three Parallel Rivers has more than 6,000 vascular plant species- more than 200 types of rhododendrons, 300 species of timber trees, and some 500 medici- nal plants. With such floral diversity, it follows that the fauna would also be extensive. There are at least 173 mammals-including rare species such as the clouded leopard and red goral-as well as more than 400 types of birds. Radical topography also engendered human diversity. Separated by uncrossable rivers and soaring mountains, individual ethnic groups developed distinct languages and traditions unique to their own environments. Three Par- allel Rivers has at least a dozen ethnic groups, including Tibetan, Yi, Naxi, Lisu, and Nu, comprising some 300,000 people. World Heritage designation is meant to preserve irreplaceable environmental and cultural diversity, so it's ironic that the Three Parallel Rivers charter doesn't protect the riv- ers themselves. One reason is that much of the natural habitat along the rivers has been affected by human settlement. But excluding the rivers serves another purpose: meeting China's desperate need for energy. Eighty per- cent of the country's electrical supply is pro- vided by coal-fired power plants. But coal dirty energy, and air pollution endangers the health of millions of Chinese. Hydropower, which now generates 15 percent of China's electricity, represents an obvious, and contro- versial, alternative. A dozen dams are planned for the Jinsha, four of which are already under construction. The Lancang has three existing dams, with two more being built, and up to nine more proposed. Only two dams have been built on the Nu, but a proposal put forward in 2003 called for 13 more. Alarmed, activists have been toiling to save the river. "Damming the Nu has become a national debate in China," says Yu Xiao- founder of Green gang, Watershed. So far Yu, along with environ- mental journalists and academics, has helped block further dam construction on the Nu and reduce the number of proposed future dams from 13 to four. But given the balloon- sale outside China-at least some of the pro-ing energy needs of China and nearby coun- tries-much of the electricity is intended for posed dams will likely be built soon. While the nearest of the monumental gorges lies within easy reach of the tourist hotels in Shangri-La, almost none of the biological diversity of the Three Parallel Rivers region can be found near the city. If another Shan- gri-La exists-a place of seclusion and seren- ity resembling the spellbinding myth in our collective imagination-it must lie out where Rock discovered a beguiling if brutal place that Hilton transfigured into a paradise. That's where I went looking for a truer Shangri-La. Cutting through snowdrifts beneath an archway of prayer flags snapping like whips, my hiking companion, Rick Kent, and I are lit- erally blown off 16,000-foot Shu Pass, thrown from Yunnan Province across the knife-edge border into Tibet. We're crossing from the Lancang watershed into the Nu watershed. The flat-line distance between the two rivers is 22 miles, but the landscape here is anything but flat. Mount Kawagebo, the highest moun- tain in Three Parallel Rivers, soars to more than 22,000 feet, its summit during this season hidden in clouds. The two-day climb to the pass starts at 7,000 feet, where the Lancang is broad and brown with mud and the hillsides are spiked with cactus-the valley so warm that farmers are growing grapes. Every thousand feet above the river brings a new ecozone: crackling deciduous forests, yellow leaves strewn on the trail like brooches; evergreen broad-leaved forests silent as a shadow; temperate coniferous forests with pungent, almost foot-long pine needles webbed in strands of lichen; alpine meadows with green grass knifing up through snow.

Describe how the city of Shangri-La acquired its name. What effect has this change had on its economy and why?