Shangri-La (Chinese: 香格里拉; pinyin: Xiānggélǐlā; Tibetan: སེམས་ཀྱི་ཉི་ཟླ།) is a county-level city in northwestern Yunnan province, China. It is the capital and largest city of Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. It is bordered by the city of Lijiang to the south and Sichuan province to the northwest, north, and east.
The city is famous for Tibetan jewelry, yak tails, Nixi pottery, Yi lacquerware, Dried matsutake mushroom and Tibetan medicinal herbs. Very good Tibetan incense. For shopping the new town is better than the old, cheaper prices. There is no problem to find an ATM (one near the "entrance" of the old district).
The main area of town runs along the north–south running Changzheng Road. The old town is at the south end of Changzheng Road, and the bus station is at the north end of town.
Historically, this area was part of the old Tibetan province of Kham but the Qing Dynasty made it administratively part of Yunnan Province in the 18th century. Today, the town is split between Tibetan and ethnic Han residents, as well as a fair smattering of Naxi, Bai, Yi and Lisu, with the surrounding countryside almost entirely Tibetan.
While the crass name change in 2001 was a sign of the desire for increasing mass tourism a la Lijiang, the town has nowhere near Lijiang's crowds, and it's still possible to experience the area's Tibetan heritage and see gorgeous countryside in near isolation.
Zhongdian was renamed Shangrila for marketing reasons, however, signs in bus stations still use Zhongdian. There is also a third name in Tibetan, Gyelthang. The original Shangrila, from James Hilton's novel The Lost Horizon, was a (fictional) hidden paradise whose inhabitants lived for centuries. Hilton (who never went to China) located his Shangri-La in the Kunlun mountains which form the border between Tibet and Xinjiang near the southern branch of the old Silk Road. The Hunza Valley in Pakistan claims to be "the original Shangrila".
Elements of Hilton's story were apparently inspired by National Geographic articles about various places in eastern Tibet, written by an American who lived in Lijiang, hence China's rationale for claiming the name. Local Khampa Tibetans claim that the name Shangri-la was most likely derived from their word for paradise "Shambala," by Hilton through exposure to Rock's writings on the region.
