James Hilton
After the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the press that the airplanes had taken off from Shangri-La. This was a kind of joke to hide the secret that they had taken off from aircraft carriers. Later, the US Navy gave that name to an aircraft carrier, and Roosevelt named his Maryland presidential retreat "Shangri-La".  (That retreat is now called Camp David since President Dwight D. Eisenhower renamed it after his grandson.) Zhongdian is a mountain region of Southwest China that has now been renamed Shangri-La (Xianggelila) because it may have inspired Hilton's book