Shangri-La City Shangri-La City Shangri-La or Xianggelila is a county-level city in northwestern Yunnan province, People's Republic of China and is the location of the seat of the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Shangri-La was formerly called Zhongdian County () but was renamed on 17 December 2001 and upgraded into a county-level city on 16 December 2014 as Shangri-La (other spellings: Semkyi'nyida, Xianggelila, or Xamgyi'nyilha) after the fictional land of Shangri-La in the 1933 James Hilton novel "Lost Horizon", in an effort to promote tourism in the area. The Tibetan population refers to this place by its traditional name Gyalthang or Gyaitang (;
James Hilton (novelist) a darker side. Flaws in the English society of his time – particularly narrow-mindedness and class-consciousness – were frequently his targets. His novel "We Are Not Alone", despite its inspirational-sounding title, is a grim story of legally approved lynching brought on by wartime hysteria in Britain. Freud – an early admirer (though he considered "The Meadows of the Moon" below par) – came to conclude that Hilton had wasted his talent by being too prolific. First published in 1933, this novel won Hilton the Hawthornden Prize in 1934. Later, Pocket Books, which pioneered the publication of small, soft-cover, inexpensive books,