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Three expeditions but no Shangri-La can be discovered
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ITS mystic appeal has long endured, but what and where is Shangri-La?
Lawyer-turned-explorer Laurence Brahm asked such questions during his first search for the lost mythical kingdom in 2002, but the answers he received were confused.
“A grand hotel,” said one. “Paradise,” said another. “A hidden country,” tried a third. Some people even gave Brahm, a question of their own, “Does it really exist?”
In search of an answer, 41-year-old Brahm and his team set off from Lhasa, capital of southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, and headed north to Qinghai Province before finally trekking south through Yunnan Province. But the answers he wanted were nowhere to be found.
Shangri-La was first mentioned in British author James Hilton’s 1933 classic novel “Lost Horizon.”
The allure of a mysterious and isolated place of permanent beauty, harmony, and spiritual resonance, enclosed deep in the Himalayas, as depicted in the book, has for decades inspired many around the world to search and explore, to find if such a place really exists, and where it could be discovered.
Brahm is one of these searchers. He put aside his job as a lawyer, organized a team and launched three expeditions between 2002 and 2004, each lasting about nine months from spring to autumn, to look for clues.
“I can say no search has ever been as in-depth as ours. We went to places that no foreigner had ever been to before,” Brahm said.
Based on the expeditions, Brahm has written a trilogy of travelogues and made several documentaries.
And he has put on a multi-media art exhibition, “Searching for Shangri-La”, in Beijing to share his stories, findings, thoughts and inspirations. The exhibition is scheduled to last two months from September 15 to November 15 in the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Caochangdi, a Beijing art district.
In their second expedition, Brahm and his team dug deep into the origin of the myth.
They found that James Hilton had never visited Asia and largely based his writing on botanist and explorer Joseph Rock’s reports on western China for the “National Geographic.”
So in 2003, the team followed the footsteps of Joseph Rock along the ancient Tea Horse Road, which for centuries had served as a trade link between China’s Yunnan and Tibet, and several Asian countries, as well as providing a vital route for Buddhism to enter China.
They wanted to find the prototype that had inspired Hilton’s book, only to discover that Shangri-La was most likely a misspelling of “Shambhala,” an ideal realm in Tibetan Buddhism, Brahm said. So the team embarked on a third expedition in 2004 — looking for Shambhala.
During their quest, they heard of the existence of a rare sutra that contained descriptions and prophecies regarding Shambhala and was preserved at Zhaxi Lhunbo Lamasery in Xigaze, Tibet.
Following clues in the sutra, the explorers finally arrived at the ruins of Guge, a powerful ancient kingdom founded around the 9th century that disappeared mysteriously in the 17th century, in Ngari Prefecture, the most isolated part of western Tibet.
Regretfully, Guge was no Shambhala either.
Shangri-La or Shambhala, it seems that Brahm learnt something unexpected on his expeditions, something more meaningful perhaps: that paradise is not some mythical place that does not exist, but a Shambhala-like future can be created by humanity through change of perceptions and its actions.
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