Editor’s Note for Monday, June 13, 2022

My thoughts today:

Shangri-La is the fictional valley in James Hilton’s 1933 novel, The Lost Horizon, reportedly inspired by the explorations of Tibetan areas of Yunnan Province in the 1920s and ‘30s by Joseph Rock, an Austrian-American botanist and ethnologist.

In the novel, Shangri-La is an earthly paradise, isolated by mountains from the outside world and its cares and pollutants.

Naturally the name has been co-opted for the most worldly uses imaginable:

In 2014, tourism authorities in Yunnan renamed the town of Zhongdian Shangri-La, ushering in a new era of tour buses and ending the area’s previous isolation. More famously, in 1971, commodity trading tycoon Robert Kuok (郭鶴年 Guō Hènián) founded the Shangri-La luxury hotel chain, which in 2002, gave its name to an annual get-together of men of war from all over Asia and the Pacific Rim, or what the professionals blandly called a “Track One inter-governmental security conference.”

Our word of the day is Shangri-La (香格里拉 xiāng gé lǐ lā). Our song of the day is referenced in the subject line of today’s newsletter: Shangrila by Billy Idol.

Lastly, if you ever wanted a complete explainer of China’s “three red lines” policy intended to rein in dodginess in the country’s real estate sector, we have one for you, written by Dorothy Chan.