A novel name for an ancient trading post

James Hilton ended his classic novel Lost Horizon with the question "Do you think he (the hero, Conway) will ever find it (Shangri-La)", but the place remained a fiction until September 1997, when the government of Yunnan province announced that Zhongdian county would change its name to Shangri-La county.

According to the local government, Shangri-La means "The sun and moon in the heart" in the ancient local language. The county was a key staging post on the Yunnan-Tibet branch of the ancient Tea-Horse Road trading route that connected Pu'er in Yunnan with Lhasa in the Tibet autonomous region.

The route was formed more than 1,300 years ago as the trade in salt and tea with India and Nepal boomed in Southwest China. Zhongdian's wooden-structured houses provided shelter for the caravans and horses that carried the goods from Yunnan to Tibet, before they turned their eyes toward their neighbors in southern Asia.