In 2002, local officials in Yunnan Province succeeded in changing the name of Zhongdian County to Xianggelila, a transliteration of the most pervasive myth ever attached to Tibet: Shangrila. This county on the southeastern corner of the Tibetan Plateau had previously been known by two names—Gyalthang, Tibetan for “Victory Plain,” and Zhongdian, Chinese for “Middle Pasture.” As the Shangrila myth was transformed into political-economic reality, Shangrila County's agricultural and religious past became fused with its future as a tourist destination. Although the area's plains, pastures, mountains, and monasteries remain, their significance has been reinterpreted by tourism developers, the Chinese state, and local Tibetans. Åshild Kolås's monograph, based on fieldwork in 2002 and 2003, documents the ways in which these groups have reinvented the area as an “authentically Tibetan” Shangrila.
Kolås's three opening chapters lay out the book's historical and conceptual background. Chapter 1 briefly recounts the history of Shangrila, the utopian vision of novelist James Hilton from his 1933 book Lost Horizon. Though it once referred to a predominantly Western tourist interest in Tibet, the Shangrila myth has become a major tourism planning initiative in southwestern China since the mid-1990s. Chapter 2 frames the establishment of Shangrila County in terms of the “place-making” activities of the state, private tourism developers, and local entrepreneurs. Chapter 3 presents Kolås's two-pronged theoretical approach, establishing that authenticity is “constituted through discourse,” and that the humanistic geography literature on place ignores “place-making as a form of power struggle” (p. 36). Kolås rightfully acknowledges a debt to poststructuralist and historical materialist thought, and argues that the important question is not whether Shangrila is an authentic place, but rather how Shangrila is made to be an authentic place (p. 36).
Kolås focuses on three different, and at times competing, constructions of place: chapter 5 concerns the ways in which Shangrila has been “sacralized” through the ritual practices and agricultural work of Tibetan households, and “re-sacralized” through tourism (pp. 71–72). Chapter 6 explores the ethnographic and political mapping of the Tibetan prefecture by the central government, national media, and entertainment industries. Kolås emphasizes the interactive nature of this process. She recounts some of the ways in which representations by non-Tibetans are met by Tibetans themselves, whose responses include the reconstruction of “traditional” family homes and marketing “Tibetan” souvenirs. Chapter 7 briefly describes some of the effects of tourism development on the Shangrila county seat, and explores the links between Shangrila and the Buddhist notion of Shambhala, a mythical place devoid of suffering. Chapter 8 is a short, final chapter exploring the discourse of authenticity and the ways in which it is used to ethnicize and commodify Tibetanness. Kolås concludes that Shangrila is more explicitly Tibetan than ever before, and that Tibetans have ostensibly “won” a representational game against other ethnic groups (p. 120). She is careful to note that the benefits brought by this commodification are distributed unevenly and carry the potential to erode a sense of place as “meaningful.”
While Kolås is intent on exploring spatial representations of Shangrila, her fieldwork is often concerned with material practice as well as discourse, as exemplified by her analysis of religious pilgrimage and the close ties between Tibetans' agricultural work and the making of sacred landscapes. There is far more to Shangrila than its representation, and while Kolås cannot be faulted for focusing on one analytical point over another, her work invites questions about the material experience of place. This pertains especially to tourists, whose role in the making of Shangrila is underemphasized in this book.
The tentative theoretical position that Kolås takes regarding place is curious. While we get a strong hint of a critical position in chapter 3 (i.e., the spatial production of an “authentic” Shangrila through “place-making” strategies), Kolås does not elaborate on her approach. She does not discuss how her focus on discourse and representation might leave other important aspects about place unexamined, notably her own interests in ritual, agricultural work, and pilgrimage. More importantly, Kolås has retained an interest in the “meaningfulness” of place, especially for the Tibetan population in Shangrila County. She argues that the invention of Shangrila has reworked the meanings of Tibetan culture, Tibetan place, and the “Tibetan” (pp. 123, 129). And there is at least the risk that a commodified Tibetanness robs Tibetans of a meaningful way of ordering their lives (p. 26). These are trenchant issues, and given the past year of ethnic tension in China's Tibetan areas, they have only become more important. Kolås is thus wise to have left open the question of the “meaning” of Shangrila as a place. However, her analysis passes over the chance to explore how power and meaning are both always a part of place.
Theoretical points aside, Kolås is at her best in the field. With a keen sense for geography, Kolås draws important links between place, tourism, and the cultural economy in contemporary southwestern China. There is much to learn from her attention to the intersection of Tibetan sacred geographies and the ideological landscape of the Communist Party. Kolås's description of the links between tourism and religion in chapters 5 and 6 is particularly strong. The book should be of interest to scholars of China and Tibet who are interested in issues of ethnicity, religion, development, and tourism and leisure in contemporary China.
