In Search of Shangri-La

Since the 19th century, Westerners have laid siege to the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet. The colonial British saw it as a strategic prize, 1920s botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward saw it as a geographical puzzle to solve and Oxford educated American Tibet scholar Ian Baker (discoverer of the hidden waterfall in the 1990s) saw it as a hidden Buddhist realm. More recently kayakers have seen the rapids as the last great whitewater challenge. They paid with their lives. For all, the reality was unimportant. All heaped their own perceptions on the mythology that had come before. This title combines adventure, travel, history and myth to tell the story of the search for the hidden falls of Shangri-la.