These days, the name is part of the language, used everywhere from Nepali airlines and Chinese hotel chains to holiday cottages in Florida and Torquay. And when the novel was turned into a Hollywood movie by Frank Capra, it was an instant success. The book enjoyed great popularity, and even the retreat of the US president at Camp David was called Shangri-La, after the paradise described in it. All the wisdom of the human race is contained in this place, in the cultural treasures stored, and in the minds of the people who have gathered here in the face of an imminent catastrophe. Set in the troubled years before World War Two, the book tells of a community in a lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan lamas), in the lost Tibetan valley of Shangri-La, cut off from the world and from time. The story of Shangri-La itself is a modern one, told by the English novelist James Hilton in his novel Lost Horizon (1933).
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