In 1999, seasoned explorers hauled GPS gear into the mountains of southern China to find a valley everyone knew was invented by a British novelist. This deep dive traces Shangri-La from James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, with its lamasery and slow-aging inhabitants, back to the Tibetan Buddhist concept of beyul, hidden sanctuaries established by Padmasambhava to preserve wisdom during times of conflict. Hilton, who never visited the Himalayas, built his valley from British Museum reading and the 1840s travelogue of French priests Huc and Gabet.

The episode follows the real expeditions that chased the fiction, including Ted Vaill and Peter Klika in Sichuan’s Muli region, Laurence Brahm in Yunnan, Michael Wood’s search for Tsaparang, and Josh Gates in the sky caves of Lo Manthang, all of which missed Hilton’s own statement that the valley was based on the priests’ route hundreds of kilometers north. It then looks at people who built their own Shangri-Las, from Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime retreat that became Camp David to retired farmer Henry Warren’s miniature stone village in North Carolina, and at the ultimate irony of China officially renaming Zhongdian as Shangri-La in 2001 to attract tourists to a place defined by isolation.

• How the ninth-century beyul concept functioned as a cultural seed vault
• The chain of cultural translation from Tibetan scripture to French missionaries to a London library
• Why explorers using the same National Geographic articles reached opposite conclusions
• Hilton’s surprising pick of Weaverville, California as his real-world paradise
• Shangri-La in Mother Love Bone, Shangri-La Frontier, and the paradox of marketing a hidden utopia