This Way to Shangri-La

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Zhongdian turns out to be an anticlimax, a one-street frontier town with a lot of hotels. Since the town was opened to foreign visitors in 1992, it has become a base camp for travelers exploring the remotest reaches of southwest China. But if anyone here is aware of the region's alleged paradise status, not many seem to be cashing in on the opportunity. The main street is refreshingly devoid of 'Shangri-La' hotels and restaurants.

Like the other Western travelers in town, I'm only here to get somewhere else-for me, Songzanling monastery, a window on the past. I hop on a local bus early the next morning, but what I find at the end of the road looks and feels more like a small village than an exotic hilltop monastery filled with arcane rituals. Mud and clay houses lie scattered around the hillside lamasery, connected by a maze of dirt pathways. Children chant prayers behind high shuttered windows. Monks and old women stream past, beaming warm, ageless smiles. There aren't any green porcelain bathtubs or central heating as in Hilton's book. The monastery has seen better days-its crumbling walls are strewn with rubble. Prior to 1949, Songzanling was a large, thriving monastery of the Yellow Hat sect. It was destroyed following the Tibetan uprising of 1959, which was brutally suppressed by the Chinese army. Today, more than 300 monks have begun the process of rebuilding.

As I make my way down a muddy pathway, past cloud-white stupas and prayer flags flapping against a cobalt blue sky, a young monk invites me in for tea. Ducking through a low door, I enter a tiny courtyard where piles of winter firewood lie stacked against a mocha-colored mud wall. Fixing me with a grin, another monk brews tea beside a small brazier-filling a bamboo tube with tea leaves, yak butter and boiling water. Since their English is as limited as my Tibetan, conversation is slow. We silently sip our yak-butter tea in the age-old tradition. The monks ask me for a photo, so I give them a passport photo of myself. No, they say, a photo of the Dalai Lama,

their spiritual leader exiled in India, whose image is contraband in China. The request seems a far cry from Hilton's 'moon-washed courtyards.'

My search takes me the next morning on the long road to the Naxi community of Baishui Tai, in a valley 50 miles southeast of Zhongdian. The backseat chorus on my bus groans each time we hit a bump, which is often as we wind along steep and rutted mountain roads. I arrive six hours later in Naxi country. It was here, I'm told, that the Naxi dongba religion and its distinctive pictographic script originated-and where Naxi shamans still read chicken entrails to see the future. In most places the revolution put an end to those sorts of things-but here in Yunnan's remote mountain valleys, a few old beliefs still linger. I wander through Baishui's creamy limestone terraces and marvel at the lost horizon spreading out before me: emerald paddy fields ringed by the snowy peaks of Yunnan.

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