I’ve talked about China’s campaign to position the sleepy Yunnan town of Zhongdian as Shangri La in an earlier post (which you can check out for my stunning photos and cutting-edge analysis). From a marketing/PR perspective, it’s a textbook example of repackaging. Slap a new name on a city, get the marketing machine rolling and, voila, you’ve got James Hilton fans flying over in droves, convinced they can live their cherished fantasy of finding the Lost Horizon that Hilton described nestled in the foothills of Tibet. The Guardian today has an insightful article on what a coup this is.

Flashing red neon tubes light up the way to the karaoke bar in Shangri-la’s Paradise hotel, where guests are invited to buy the company of hostesses: 100 yuan (£7) to sing for an hour, 200 yuan for a shared dance.

Five minutes further on is the Shangri-la “Old Town”, built from scratch in the past two years. The elegantly carved wooden buildings are already full of trinket sellers offering fluffy yaks, prayer beads and ceremonial daggers, while black-market hawkers walk the cobbled streets touting fake Rolex watches and Ray-Ban sunglasses.

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It is probably not what James Hilton had in mind when he dreamed up Shangri-la in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon. But, in one of the most audacious rebranding exercises in history, this scruffy but spectacularly located Himalayan town has been renamed after the British author’s fictional utopia and designated a tourist paradise by order of the Chinese government.

The transformation of this once remote community into a sightseeing hub is part of a new phase of China’s economic expansion, which is taking the modernisation drive into some of the most remote places on earth, reducing poverty but ruining the environment…..

[C]onservationists face a losing battle against the 100 tour operators, hotel chains and travel agents in Shangri-la that are keen to grab a slice of the 50bn yuan budget allocated by Beijing to develop tourism in Shangri-la in the next decade. “Overall tourism is good. If we didn’t have this, we would rely on logging or mining, which are more destructive,” said Ziren Pingcuo, a Tibetan photographer and environmental activist. “But it is hurting the ecology, it is ruining the atmosphere of sacred places, and not enough of the benefits are passed on to local people.”

It is the same story across China’s least developed – and most beautiful – regions, which are now opening up to foreign visitors and domestic tourists from the wealthy eastern seaboard. In the past five years, the number of domestic tourist visits has increased from 744 million to 1.2 billion.

The rural landscape of Shangri-la remains bucolic, but the town is anything but an idyll. In one restaurant beggars enter to ask for money. A group of soldiers, reluctant to interrupt a drinking game that has one of them throwing up beside the table, shoos them away. “Don’t bother us. Go and ask the foreigner for money.” The closer you get to Shangri-la, the further it seems from utopia.

Zhongdian was interesting. Utopia it is surely not. I had planned to stay there three days, but cut it down to two. That’s more than enough time to see the temple and the yaks. If you go there looking for Lost Horizon, trust me, you’re in the wrong place.