Back to Shangri-la

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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the Chinese are good capitalists. Tourism is an obvious choice and so about 5 years the was a big brouha as to what town would get the claim to Shangrila. Quite a few contenders to William Hinton’s name sake. Eventually a Tibetan border town called zhongdian in Yunnan Province took the title.

20 years ago almost to the day I spent a few days at the big Tibetan monastary outside of town.At that fine it was illegal for foreigners to visit without a Virtually unattainable permit. I went anyway and managed to spend 2 unforgetable days at the monastary

At that time, there was a group of monks and lama’s sent by the Daliai Lama for 6 months. One of those monks spoke very good English and befriended us. the local Tibetans spoke very little Chinese at that time.

the second day just happend to be the big public sermon day by the reincarnate lama sent from India. So. I took some slides with all 300 monks as well as the monastary itself. most of the monks were under 10 and a Small % were over 60 with none in between. Must also be pointed out that at the time of my visit 95% of the monastary was in ruins.

Fast forward to today as I write this in the plane and will post when land in Lijiang about 150 km away. My company is having a big customer offsite for multinational companies on Thurs and Fri.

Saturday I will take a select group of colleagues and customers that I consider friends back to the monastary. I have scanned the 7 slides from 2o year ago, made prints. and will give them to the monastery. See how many of those child monks recognize themselves.

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Sounds wonderful. :slight_smile: Will you be posting photos someplace we can see them too?

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I remember my visit to that monestery very well. I had bought one of those Kodak disposable cameras in Lijiang before taking the bus up to Zhongdian in February 2000. As I was touring around, I asked a monk if I could get a picture with him. (At that time, my Chinese was pretty passable, although my vocabulary was limited.) He agreed, and then commented on how pretty my yellow and red camera was. I really regret not having an extra with me to give to him.

We chatted for about 20 minutes, he showed me around – there were a couple of young monks doing some interesting type of exercise in which one would ask some kind of question, timing the key word in his question to the stomp of his foot or the clap of his hands. The other would answer the question with a flourish of his own. IT was as if each was trying to outdo the other while playing a game of Snaps.

Then I met up with a cute Australian chick and we flirted for a couple days, before she headed off to Chengdu and me to Dali.

Yep, good times.

I’d love to see the photos, too, if you can post them somewhere.

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i’ll post photos next week. i hear it’s snowing & will find out tomorrow.

ravenman, i did one trip with an australian women that was way past the flirting stage.

what you saw was gelupa sect debating.