In 2002, Shangrila (Ch.: Xianggelila) became the new name of Zongdian County in the culturally rich borderland of western China. The edited volume Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands presents ten cuts in the complex processes and projects of various agents that are creating multiple landscapes of Shangrila as a Tibetan place, ecological zone, tourist attraction, and so forth. The book, then, is a welcome move away from a predominant view of Shangrila as a product of “Western” desires and fantasies (already studied in depth by numerous authors) towards emic understandings of place-making, representation, and place-based subjecthood in a region of China that has been elevated from peripheral to central status in Chinese state policies.

The ten case studies constitute a multi-modal and interdisciplinary investigation of Shangrila as a “contested landscape” by seeing it—as a physical place and as an idea—from different vantage points. A few of the studies are less preoccupied by the landscape itself as an object of analysis, but focus on its inhabitants and managers. For instance, in the fascinating study by Charlene E. Makley on the revival of local Tibetan cults of autochthonic deities abiding in the landscape, we learn about the powerful place-based deities and deity mediums who are mediating the local inhabitants' socio-moral fortune.

Li-hua Ying's study, an investigation of literary representations of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands as “vital margins,” also examines mediation, treating the landscape itself as a mediator in the process of “othering.” Ying convincingly unfolds the ways in which the landscape, within a Mandarin-language discourse on Shangrila, has become vital to Chinese spiritual longing as a mode of self-reflection and self-transformation, particularly for the outsider who is fleeing his or her materialistic and modern urban life, and who through his or her voyeuristic gaze at the “authentic other” is searching for an “original self.” As in the rest of the chapters, the concept of “landscape” is not merely an analytical perspective through which a particular place can be understood. Instead the focus lies on the processes of landscape consumption, management, transformation, meaning-making, identity formation, and the new landscapes that emerge from such phenomena.

The authors deftly connect these processes to the context of the Chinese Communist Party's imperatives to construct the “ecological state” (Ch.: shengtai lizhou) and a “harmonious society” (Ch.: hexie shehui), and during times of rapid economic growth. The book is therefore also an important addition to the growing body of studies on China's borderlands (material and conceptual), which are central to social, political, and economic transformations in contemporary China.