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 (;
Random Harvest Random Harvest Random Harvest is a novel written by James Hilton, first published in 1941. Like previous Hilton works, including "Lost Horizon" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", the novel was immensely popular, placing second on "The New York Times" list of best-selling novels for the year. The novel was successfully adapted into a film of the same name in 1942 under the direction of Mervyn LeRoy. Claudine West, George Froeschel and Arthur Wimperis adapted the novel for the screen, and received an Academy Award nomination for their work. Though the film departs from the novel's narrative in several significant ways, the