This Side of Paradise

Frank Capra had it all wrong. In his 1937 fllm adaptation of James Hilton's book Lost Horizon, after the plane crashes in some remote region in China and the survivors realize that if they remain in this unmapped utopia, they'll never age, they slip into the rhythm of the place. Shearing sheep and singing songs become a way of life, and in the movie version, Shangri-La has its own sound track: a harplike cooing made by flutes attached to the wings of pigeons.

And this is where Capra was off. Because, yes, Zhongdian, the town in southwestern China that supposedly inspired the novel, is a magical paradise surrounded by snowcapped mountains and gravity-defying temples, and, yes, despite the barren landscape, the population does seem to relish the everyday tasks of hanging barley out to dry and shucking corn. But the sound track is definitely not the angelic music of harps. It is the constant clanking of cowbells affixed to the yaks who come and go with the sun.

Just outside my window at the Banyan Tree Ringha, in fact, is a herd I've been watching for a few days now. Each morning, the pack of six or so cross the river that marks the edge of the two-year-old resort, ignoring the wild horses that graze on grass and lope past the red euphorbia bushes sprinkled across a two-mile-high plateau as if in a connect-the-dots puzzle. They clank their way up an escarpment to a nearby farm, where they probably spend their afternoons hauling carts of manure or helping an eighty-year-old farmer collect his harvest.

My time in Shangri-La has been filled with far less heavy lifting. Yesterday our guide, Huang, took my mother, Roberta, my four-year-old son, Gideon, and me to the Songzanlin Monastery, the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Yunnan province. At the peak of its importance, around 1724, this faithful facsimile of Tibet's Potala Palace, in Lhasa, housed 3,000 monks; today 700 study under the resident high lama. We arrived during their morning prayers, ascending two hundred steps to reach the entrance of the temple, which is built along a mountainside and topped with a copper-gilded stupa. Twenty scarlet-robed boys sat lotus style in long rows in the main hall, chanting in a mesmerizing low, throaty moan that was repeated in faded tones, like echoes. Through our outfitter, Remote Lands, we'd secured a private audience with a high-ranking monk, his dark chamber perfumed with butter-oil lamps. Only a sliver of natural light illuminated the half-dozen statues of lamas past, their beatific faces encouraging us to bow in their presence and drop yuan at their feet.

In 2002, the town of Zhongdian was renamed Shangri-La, a brilliant marketing move by the central government in Beijing. For centuries leading up to the switch, the Yunnan region was not really even part of China. Indeed, in the 1700s, during the Qing Dynasty, the emperor treated the province much as the British treated Australia: as a wild, far-off land suitable only for army trainees and adventurers, or exiles. Yunnan was not officially brought under the Chinese umbrella until after World War II, in 1949. All along, the northwestern region that contains Zhongdian, called the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, had been left in limbo, with a mostly Tibetan population living much as it had for a thousand years. It is said that here, more than 1,200 miles away from the police who monitor Lhasa like hawks (and, recently, like Soviet spies), their culture can thrive.

To anyone who has not been to Shangri-La, the name change seems like a stretch. James Hilton never entered China, and surely did not set foot in Yunnan, and until the Banyan Tree hotel group decided to reconstruct twenty-three traditional Tibetan farmhouses on a windswept plot, neither did travelers who required more than just a leakproof roof over their heads. Still, after a couple of days up on the plateau — maybe it's the endless brown horizon or the streaks of falling stars or the cowbells calling out to the prayer flags, which seem to wave right back — it's hard not to buy into the government's claim of utopia. Then again, maybe I'm just being nostalgic. A week has gone by too fast.

En route to my slice of heaven, we did the touristy requisites: snapped photos of the rushing Yangtze at Tiger Leaping Gorge, where busloads of people obscured the view; hiked nearly to the top of Thousand Turtle Mountain to glimpse an unimpeded panorama of the valley; endured a communal hot-pot meal of sliced meats boiled in a bowl of broth. But it was the times we went off the menu that I often found myself surprised: why wasn't this version of China mentioned in the papers back home? I've read so often of crooked factory owners and smog-smeared cities, of the run-up to the Olympics and of Beijing's stranglehold on the nation's 1.3 billion citizens, but rarely are column inches devoted to a farmer who lives comfortably in a six-house village just outside paradise.

We met such a man, Sun Nuo Qi Lin, in the town of Nixi, where he welcomed us into his home, a less luxurious version of our wooden farmhouse at the Banyan Tree Ringha. His yak and goats live in the prime real estate of his house — the ground-floor courtyard — while Sun Nuo, a farmer and potter whose pieces are on display in the National Museum of China in Beijing (but sell for just ten yuan each), and his wife occupy the dark upstairs quarters. The mistress of the residence fixed us steaming bowls of salty, fatty yak-butter tea, piles of tsampa (barley bread) and firm, pungent yak-milk cheese, three Tibetan staples. She showed us the outdoor latrine, her husband's spare studio and their bed of wooden planks. Her face was leathered and lined by the unfiltered sun that lives at 10,000 feet, but she lit up when she led us to her hen-filled patio.

Even before my affliction with full-on utopia set in, before I'd slept in a replica of a Tibetan village and worn the same traditional robe to dinner as every other guest at the Banyan Tree Ringha (it's much colder than anyone packs for), I should probably have seen this wave of euphoria coming. Flying five hours west from Beijing, we puddle-jumped over cities of 10 million that grew out of dusty nothingness and had names I'd never heard, until we descended through a cornflower blue sky to Lijiang. From the airport, Huang took us on our first cultural exchange: to the home of a Naxi shaman, where we learned to paint hieroglyphics on wood-fiber paper (the Naxi are one of the few remaining ethnic groups in the world to use pictographs) and strummed the medicine man's lutelike erbu. The thirty-minute drive to Lijiang's Old Town was just as enlightening; our mouths were wide open as we passed mountains striped red with ferrous soil and golden patchworks of sunflowers and corn and tobacco. We whizzed by roadside villages whose tiled roofs glistened with honey-colored glaze. Tall stands of sesame plants lined the highway, their magenta-dotted stalks creating a picket fence that led all the way to the Old Town.

In 1253, legend has it, during his menacing march south, Kublai Khan named the city Lijiang, which means "beautiful river." At the entrance to what is now called the Venice of the East stands a thirty-foot-high waterwheel that pushes snowmelt from the Himalayas through narrow canals. At dusk, strings of red lights illuminate intricately carved wooden houses, giving the Ming-era village a Disney-esque glow. Everything looks ancient — from the tea shops to the canal-side cafés and the cobblestoned walkways, smoothed by centuries of footsteps — but in reality, Lijiang is largely reconstructed. In 1996, it was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed hundreds and injured thousands. (Thankfully, the region was unaffected by the devastating quake in neighboring Sichuan in May.) Most buildings were destroyed or damaged, but there was a silver lining. When journalists descended on the city of 1 million, they found an animist people, the Naxi, almost untouched by time or by the ethnic Han group, which dominates the rest of China. The attention led to Lijiang gaining UNESCO World Heritage site status and, ultimately, 4 million visitors a year. As far as we could tell, though, we were the only tourists; the majority of the travelers here are Chinese. Not one sign is in English or even Pinyin, the phonetic transliteration of Chinese characters into Roman letters. Without Huang, we would have been lost.

Every few minutes, another group of Chinese travelers stopped to take photos of my blond, blue-eyed son; it's not often that a Western child traipses through this part of the country. He patiently obliged, a fake smile plastered on his little face. In the tea shops, wrapped cakes of dried leaves stamped with their varietal — pu-erh, green liu an, lychee red — lined the walls, like books in a library, and a shopkeeper offered us samples, using hot water that streamed through a tea table. Later, as the moon rose overhead, I paid a woman wearing traditional Naxi dress — embroidered red apron over white peasant frock — a few yuan for a handmade candle. Along with a match, she granted me three wishes. But as I placed my purchase in the slow-moving current of a canal, following the prescribed ritual, I couldn't think of anything to ask for.

The Banyan Tree Lijiang, which is laid out like a Naxi city, with cobblestoned walkways and a central pagoda, was just how I would have envisioned the ultimate Chinese resort. Its fifty-five villas are replicas of Yunnanese courtyard houses, their roofs upturned and private plunge pools in place of livestock pens. Red silk lanterns hang above the white-linened platform beds. We exchanged formalities in a whisper, so deferential of the retreat were we. Whole days can be spent sitting beside the koi-filled reflection pond, counting the curves in the back of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the gray Himalayan peaks in the distance. As pleasant a place as it was to stay the night, it was an even more spectacular room to wake up in. Tucked beneath our fluffy duvets, crickets chirping and no light pollution to dampen the sky, we slept with the carved sliding doors drawn wide open until shards of sunlight signaled a new day.

Because this was a cultural journey, however, we eventually pried ourselves from our walled compound to visit the town of Liming, two hours away. If other Westerners had been here before, they'd left little mark. Men loitering in doorways peered at our roving pack of travelers. The occasional sheep ambled across the one-lane road. A Lisu woman, whose ethnic kin can also be found in Myanmar, Thailand and India, served us meat and rice in stone bowls as a young girl did her washing in the drainage ditch. A group of dancers in red velvet shirts and black-beaded hats performed traditional Lisu songs and somewhat clumsy seven-step circle dances on the cracking tarmac of the Liming basketball court. Their bandleader, an affable and ambidextrous man, kept the tune by blowing through a gourd — with his nose — while smoking a pipe, playing a four-string guitar and jumping up and down like Pan.

Taking a step back to see the whole picture of China and all the political and social limitations it suggests, you realize it's crazy to think that James Hilton would ever set his Shangri-La in this country. But there it is, perfection. Yunnan means "south of the clouds," and it's true that the province's countless days of sunshine nurture incredible diversity: botanical, animal and cultural. Perhaps I'd feel different if my plane crash-landed up here and I were forced to stay, but one week so far removed from my own reality, so unencumbered by the daily grind, is definitely not enough. I'm not sure one month would be. Even with those cowbells to wake me up.

Native Intelligence

When to go

Yunnan has four distinct seasons, but even in summer, temperatures can be colder (and it can be much wetter) than you'd expect. I went in early autumn, just as the trees were changing from green to red. Days ranged from the 50s to the upper 60s, and each morning, there was frost on the bushes.

Getting there

You need a visa to enter any part of mainland China; just as critical is a guide. Far outside the big cities of Beijing and Shanghai, no signs are in English. I chose to have everything, from my internal flights and private audiences with high-ranking monks to lunches in farmers' homes, arranged by Remote Lands (from $1,000 per person a day, all inclusive; 646-415-8092; remotelands.com), a luxury outfitter that specializes in custom journeys throughout Asia. The owner, Catherine Heald, is so connected that she and her team can handle pretty much anything you require: a private plane from Shanghai to Lijiang; an English-speaking babysitter in Shangri-La; a vegetarian dinner in a housewife's garden.

Where to stay

Banyan Tree Lijiang To enter this nineteen-acre retreat, which resembles a Naxi village, you must first cross a bridge over a koi pond and pass through a stone and wood archway framing a three-tiered pagoda. In the distance, white-capped Jade Dragon Snow Mountain marks the southernmost section of the Himalayas, but here it's warm enough to loll in an outdoor hot tub or plunge pool, order room service in your walled compound (each of the fifty-five villas is a modern remake of a Naxi courtyard house) and even sleep with the sliding doors open. Pains have been taken to adhere to the local vernacular, so every tree and tile and silk throw is a reminder that you're in Yunnan, at a southern stop along the legendary Silk Road. Villas from $600. Yuerong Rd., Shuhe, Gucheng District, Lijiang; 011-86-888-533-1111; banyantree.com/lijiang.

Banyan Tree Ringha When is a hotel in the middle of nowhere — with staffers who barely speak English and no amenities beyond a simple restaurant, a teahouse and a five-room spa — flawless? When it's the Banyan Tree Ringha, down a paved road three miles from Shangri-La. The thirty-two suites and lodges at the retreat are actually in a handful of Tibetan farmhouses that were slavishly taken apart and reconstructed on-site. Each has teak floors and a central flrepit, several daybeds for lounging around and an expansive courtyard overlooking a narrow river or an alpine valley. The one-bedroom Spa Suites come with 540-square-foot bathrooms whose handmade wooden tubs could fit at least five four-year-olds. The little extras are what really won me over: the silk scarf draped around your neck at check-in; Elemis toiletries presented in a beautiful linen bag (I swiped mine, shhh); a traditional Tibetan robe to wear when the mercury drops (it's quite a sight when every guest turns up at dinner in the same red and black dressing gown); free Internet access; and a telescope in the lobby. Suites from $450, Spa Suites from $800, lodges from $935. Hong Po Village, Jian Tang Town, Shangri-La County, Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture; 011-86-887-828-8822; banyantree.com/ringha.