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‘It was, indeed, a strange and almost incredible sight. A group of coloured pavilions clung to the mountainside...’

- Shangri-La as described in James Hilton's novel "Lost Horizon".

 
Shangri-La: The Secret Utopia
An ideal community somewhere in Asia, isolated from the corruption of civilisation, has captured the imagination of the 20th century. Does this paradise exist? How much of its reputation is true? Where is it most likely to be located?
A secret community of lamas living beyond the normal span and able to foresee the future is dedicated to the preservation of civilisation--including Chinese porcelain and Mozart--against barbarism they predict will overtake the outside world. Lost Horizon, James Hilton's romantic adventure novel, with its hidden monastery and poignant love story, captured the Western imagination and Shangri-La has, with Atlantis, Lyonesse and Eldorado, become part of popular mythology as an aspiration, a dream world, often sought but seldom found.

Shambhala, now another name for Shangri-La, was reputed to lie in or north of Tibet, where seemingly impassable mountains (Himalayas ? Kun Lun Mountains ? Altai Mountains?) enclosed secret valleys that were both fertile and verdurous. But did this hidden paradise ever exist or was its reality wholly spiritual. The Dalai Lama's Potala Palace at Lhasa in Tibet is reputed to be linked by subterranean tunnels with Chang Shambhala, 'a northern place of quietude'. The Buddhist tradition of a subterranean paradise known as Agartha has also been linked with Shambhala, perhaps by the celebrated medium Madame Blavatsky

The Russian-born traveller, Nicholas Roerich, who called it Agharti, heard of it on his 1924 expedition through the Altai Mountains, Mongolia and Tibet. A lama told him Shambhala was a great city at the heart of Agharti where ruled the 'king of the world'. Roerich became convinced Agharti was linked to all the nations of the world by subterranean tunnels.

Edward Bulwer Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii, described in his novel The Coming Race (1871) a world under the earth's crust where live a superior race, the Vril-ya. By the exercise of vril--a psychokinetic energy more developed in the female, dominant, sex--they plan to conquer the 'upper world'

The notion of this superior race and their mystical vril power proved a powerful attraction to both occultists and Nazis. Hitler is said to have believed in vril power and in a race of supermen living underground. He is supposed to have sent expeditions to search in German, Swiss, and Italian mines for the entrance to their kingdom.
 

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