Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino‐Tibetan Borderlands

MAPPING SHANGRILA: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands. Edited by Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins, xv and 332; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014. $30.00 (paper), isbn 9780295993584. Like many others, I first visited Shangri La in my mind when as a youth I read James Hilton's 1922 novel Lost Horizon. Among its pages I discovered the imaginary landscape and society of "Shangri La," a term Hilton had invented to refer to his paradisiacal world, which he ambiguously located somewhere in the Himalaya. In 2001, the Chinese government plotted this mythical place within its own sovereign territory, specifically in Zhongdian County (Gyalthang in Tibetan) located in northwestern Yunnan Province. It renamed the county "Shangri La" and began developing it for commercial purposes. With this bold stroke of cartographic and literary appropriation came a transformative period of social, economic, and environmental change in the region. When I first visited the Chinese way station of Shangri La in 2006 the transformation was just underway, but already I could see momentum build in the landscape: a flurry of building construction, new infrastructures, signboards everywhere proclaiming paradise, local people anticipating a generous and prosperous future. And so it was with great interest that I received this book. The region under study here is a wonder of the natural world with spectacular summits, gorges, and renowned biodiversity, as well as a verge of cultures, where Han, Tibetan, Naxi, and other peoples intermingle among farming valleys, pastures, towns, and ancient trading routes. It is a difficult but picturesque frontier that historically attracted many famous explorers and adventurers, and nowadays is filling with tourists who arrive with guidebooks in hand and a hankering for the "exotic other." It is a geostrategic borderland of imperial politics that is controlled by China and overlooking India and Southeast Asia. It is a place rooted in the geographical imagination but with branches now in the prosaic matters of nature conservation and economic promotions. Finally, it is a place worthy of serious scholarship and the editors of this book have done a fine job assembling recent studies into a comprehensive volume of ethnography and placed-based geographical analysis. While each chapter is finely written and informative, in the end this book is greater than the sum of its parts. That is a good thing. Too often I find edited volumes suffering from a lack of focus, which leaves me wondering what the greater arc of the book was about. Not so in this case. The editors have a done a very good job not only of soliciting good material, but of organizing it into a meaningful whole. They accomplished this in part by bundling chapters into thematic sections with short but helpful introductory overviews. These openers do not simply summarize the included chapters; they explain why each is important to the book and how one links to another. This is helpful because it provides the reader with a conceptual framework for the material and a better understanding of the editors' overall intentions in producing the book. Three chapters on landscape and the geographical imagination appear in part I "Shangrilization," which the editors preface with a bit of theory and a brief discussion of the changes that are taking place within the region since its designation by the Chinese as "Shangri La." The opening chapter by Li-hua Ying appropriately takes its cue from the literary epistemology of Shangri La to examine how contemporary literature in China, including poetry, indigenous folk tales, and travel accounts, constructs diverse landscape meanings for different audiences, specifically showing how this applies to the Shangri La effort. Chapters by Chris Vasantkumar and Travis Klingberg situate Shangri La in the imaginary renderings of greater Tibet--as a sort of microcosm of a mythical landscape, and more generally in the historical discovery of the Himalayan frontier. …