Shangri-la

Ray Davies and one of the most beautiful and majestic places in the world come together (right now...) in the magic-evoking term. Actually, this Spiegel article discusses a discovery of what may very well be what "Shangri-la" (of James Hilton's marvelously fantastic piece of orientalism) or "Shambhala" refer to. This is the mythical realm that fired the imaginations of European explorers. The terrain is so forbidding to exploration by foot that the imagination was left to fill in the unreachable blindspots in the Himalayan geography. The Silver Palace of Garuda, and the "cradle of Tibetan culture"....

Bruno Baumann carefully guides his canoe through the raging waters of the Sutlej River. Suddenly he can hardly believe his eyes: a huge labyrinth of caves appears behind a gate-like formation in the middle of the rock face of the cliffs. Along a stretch of the river extending for several kilometers, a lost city of crumbled monasteries, temples and walls, glinting in reds and silvers in the afternoon sun, rises up to 400 meters (1,312 feet) above the river valley...

At an altitude of more than 5,000 meters (16,400 feet), large settlements protrude from barren cliffs. The structures, made of pounded clay, cannot possibly be dilapidated Lama temples. "The cradle of Tibetan culture doesn't lie in Lhasa," says Baumann, as he descends from Mt. Kailash, "but in the distant past of the Shang Shung kings."...

The remnants of ancient foundations are everywhere, and the remains of ramparts extending several hundred meters line the top of the cliff. Locals call the mountain "Khardong," or "In the View of the Palace."

This, Baumann realizes, must have been where it all began, the cradle of Tibetan culture, in a bleak, high valley settled by nomads, at least 1,000 kilometers (622 miles) from Lhasa.