0f all the world's great myths, the oldest and the most enduring
is the tale of an earthly paradise.
A place beyond the clouds, untouched by time and death,
where the ancient wisdom still lives on.
The land has many names.
0ne of them is Shangri-La.
(PROPELLER STUTTERS)
- What's happening? - We're out of fuel!
The story of Shangri-La begins with a plane crash in the wilds of Tibet.
The hero, Conway, is rescued by mysterious strangers
who take him to a valley unmarked on any map...
..a place where time has stood still.
Welcome to Shangri-La.
In our congested and material age,
we humans still dream of a world beyond the here and now,
in another time zone than our own.
The very name Shangri-La has come to mean a paradise on earth.
But could Shangri-La have been a real place? Where did the story come from?
The story of Shangri-La was invented in the 1930s by James Hilton
in his novel ''Lost Horizon''.
The tale of a hidden valley where wisdom was preserved to save us from self-destruction
struck a deep chord in the pessimistic years between the two world wars.
But like all good stories, Shangri-La wasn't plucked out of the sky.
Its roots lie in an ancient legend and in a tantalising cluster of rumours
which surfaced in the 16th century.
(HORNS HONK)
The rumours surfaced here in India.
The path which leads to Shangri-La begins in the north Indian city of Agra,
in the 16th century, the capital of the Mogul empire.
In those days, India was the centre of the world,
the emperor, Akbar the Great, as powerful as any king on earth.
A Muslim who ruled a Hindu empire,
Akbar was fascinated by the ancient myths of Hindu India.
He sent an expedition to find the source of the sacred River Ganges,
which legend said fell from heaven.
When the expedition returned to Agra, Akbar's court heard fantastic tales
of an unknown land beyond the Himalayas.
His Christian guests were astonished to hear about a kingdom
where the people worshipped a saviour and had monks and monasteries, like them.
It was nothing less than a lost world.
And there was more. A Muslim merchant stood up here in the royal audience hall
and said he knew more about this unknown kingdom.
It had cities and thousands of people
and its religious rituals were uncannily similar to the Christians'.
And it had a name: Shambala.
(BIRDS CALLING)
And on Shambala there hangs quite a tale.
For centuries, the story had been told of a magic land north of the Himalayas,
a land of peace and plenty,
a paradise on earth.
The tale is still told today.
There is a legend that far away, beyond the Himalayas, lies a secret valley
hidden by a ring of snow-covered peaks.
At its centre is a beautiful crystal mountain.
This is the gateway to the kingdom of Shambala.
Here, the people live in peace and harmony.
There is no hunger or sickness, they live long and happy lives.
Now, the task for the rulers of Shambala
is to guard the treasures of human knowledge,
ready for the time, which will come, when the world will be ruined by war, violence
and greed.
Of course, some say Shambala is purely an imaginary land...
..but others say it is a real place
and it can still be found,
if only the seeker knows where and how to look.
Tricky things, myths, aren't they, especially here in India.
Nowhere else is the line so bewitchingly blurred between the real world
and the land of dreams.
(BELL TINKLING)
The entire notion of this mythical kingdom is...
..that it's somehow a better world.
It's a better existence, it's a better reality.
- Kings live forever, hundreds of years. - Yeah, yeah.
There's no hunger and that's important because this is a culture where hunger exists.
But is there any sense, in the legend,
that it's actually possible to go, physically, to journey to Shambala, on this earth?
Or does the physical journey become a purely spiritual one?
Does the tradition have anything to say on that?
I think it's not geography, Michael, and I don't think it was intended to be.
I think, Michael...
..journeys that don't end are so much more exciting.
(MICHAEL LAUGHING)
And so I set off on a journey which might not end to a place which might not exist.
My plan was to follow the route of the first explorers of Tibet,
who tried to find the land of Shambala.
Because the legend of Shambala, I think, holds the key to the tale of Shangri-La.
(ANNOUNCEMENT ON PA SYSTEM)
I wasn't the first, of course.
Ever since the 16th century, a stream of Westerners, driven by the legend,
has tried to find the magic kingdom,
each believing in his own Shangri-La.
In those days, there were three ways to go.
A great circle, east through Sikkim
or west, through the closed land of Ladakh,
or straight over the greatest wall of peaks on earth.
This was the route of the first seeker, a young Portuguese Jesuit, Antonio Andrade.
Andrade's adventure would have been completely forgotten
but for the survival of the account he wrote at the time.
This is it: ''O Descobrimento Do Tibet'', ''The Discovery of Tibet''.
It describes one of the most fascinating journeys in history.
(VENDOR CALLING OUT)
Seeking what he thought might be a lost Christian kingdom,
Andrade and his friend Marquez set off disguised as Hindu pilgrims.
(CROWD TALKING AND CHANTING)
(RELIGIOUS SINGING)
Their first stop was Haridwar on the River Ganges.
Haridwar is particularly sacred to Indian people
because this is the point where the Ganges rushes down
between two great rocky hills from the Himalayan foothills
and meets the plains of India.
It's one of the stages on its journey from heaven to the sea, as the Indians say.
And I suppose that's what paradises are about.
It's a perennial urge in human nature to seek them...
..to step out of our time zone into another.
(SHELLS TRUMPETING)
And sacred places like this are where the contact is sharpest...
..where for a moment you can actually cross over into another world.
(BELLS AND GONGS SOUNDING)
From Haridwar, the path to the mysterious 16th-century land of Shambala
led into the Himalayan foothills.
Like Akbar's expedition and the Jesuit Andrade, I followed the sacred Ganges...
..up and up.
(MICHAEL) That's the highest mountain in India. No, no, no. Just the...
what look like canyons and river valleys.
Because this is the...
So we've roughly sorted out where we're going!
- What are you doing? - We are blasting.
Blasting, morning, today?
- So we have to wait. Road is closed. - Closed.
Right.
Well, that's irritating.
Another seeker, the British explorer William Moorcroft, was stopped here in 1812.
Shaking with fear, he had to crawl along the 100-foot precipice
disguised in the turban and pantaloons of a Persian merchant.
(HUGE BLAST)
Just look at that cloud of dust!
Of course, in the story of Shangri-La,
and in the ancient legend of Shambala,
getting to the magic kingdom is a great feat in itself.
And it still is today, in a sense.
This road was only blasted through in the late 20th century.
Until then, the only way was to follow up these gorges on a narrow footpath.
For centuries, the only people to do that were the holy men, the sadhus and the pilgrims
who made their way up into those remote wastes.
Beyond the gorges, Andrade entered a landscape no outsider had ever seen before...
..a world where gods manifested themselves in snow peaks and ice caves
and the lips of glaciers.
They were heading for Badrinath,
the shrine of the great god Vishnu, the preserver of the universe.
And at Badrinath, we entered the military zone bordering China.
(SPEAKING OWN LANGUAGE)
(MICHAEL) Do we need our piece of paper back?
- Take care. - Thank you. Thank you.
''Ahead, now, ''Andrade wrote,
''I saw the highest and most terrible mountains that could possibly be imagined on this earth. ''
His guides were leading him to the 20,000-foot Mana Pass into Tibet.
So here we are.
This is Mana, the last village in India.
This is where a British expedition to find the source of the Ganges turned back in 1808.
''It was a sight of majestic splendour, '' one of them wrote,
''but it filled our minds with dread.
''The locals told us that beyond these peaks lay an ancient city built by the gods,
''but our guides refused to go on,
''saying we could make the attempt ourselves if we wished to be turned into stone. ''
A young Indian prince, brave and strong,
set off in search of Shambala.
After crossing many mountains
and facing snow leopards and winged lions with turquoise manes,
he came to the cave of an old hermit
who asked him, ''Where on earth are you going across these wastes of snow and ice?''
''To find Shambala,'' the youth replied.
''Aha!'' said the old man.
''Then I can help you.
''When you reach Copper Mountain, your path will blocked by an impassable river.
''There you will meet a terrifying demon called Flashing Lightning.
''She will ask, 'Why have you come and what do you desire?'
''If you answer with a true heart, she will freeze the river
''and allow you to cross and continue your journey.
''But if you are unworthy, ''you will go no further.''
It was no supernatural power that blocked our way.
Since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s,
the Mana Pass, which Andrade took, has been closed
and we were forbidden to cross.
And so, to continue our journey, we were forced to make a great detour, through Nepal.
(SHEPHERD SHOUTING)
Nearly 300 miles west of Kathmandu lies the village of Simikot.
It's a tiny government outpost in a land in the grip of civil war.
In the mountains all around us were Maoist guerrillas.
0ur plan now was to slip into Tibet through the back door as tourists.
And here in Simikot, we found our means of transport.
And we found our guide.
Descended from a long line of Tibetan lamas, the grandson of a great magician,
Tsewang is a man adept at crossing between worlds.
The old track ways through western Nepal into Tibet are all blocked by Maoist guerrillas.
So we're hitching a lift with a medical foundation
who are taking medicines and supplies over the mountains into the Limi valley.
We'll walk into Tibet from there.
It sounds easy when you put it like that.
0n paper, our detour through Nepal looked long, hard and risky.
But better than we could have ever planned, it proved the right path to take.
Tsewang had been right. There were no guerrillas down there in the Limi valley.
0ur Russian pilots, though, weren't taking any chances
and left the engine running as they threw our bags out.
There they go.
Phwoar! How about that?
So this is Limi valley, the last valley before Tibet.
(BELLS JINGLING)
(DRUM BEATING QUICK RHYTHM)
We're inside Nepal here,
but the people belong to the ancient culture of western Tibet,
an unbroken link with the time, 1,000 years ago,
when the legend of the Himalayan paradise first appeared.
Here in Limi, I felt as if I'd dropped through a trapdoor into another time,
into a place where the world of Tibetan myth was still alive.
That night in the monastery, they summoned the spirits
with drums and trumpets.
(DEEP, RESONATING NOTES)
And Death himself appeared.
Not an abstraction but a black-faced demon
who showed me my destiny on a piece of human skull.
The great hero and magician Padma the Wise
chose 21 secret valleys in the Himalayas
and in them he hid the most precious treasures known to man.
He made these valleys invisible, so the story goes,
intending that they shall only reappear in times of trouble.
Now, some say this is just a fairy story.
But others say that the treasures Padma hid were wisdom and knowledge
and when the time comes, the enlightened will be guided to these valleys,
where they will rediscover the sacred objects and texts
that will be needed to rebuild the world.
Amazing houses, aren't they?
The next day, as custom demands, we paid a visit to the keeper of the secret valley,
the lama of the monastery of Jhang.
Wow! What an amazing place.
God, this is astonishing, isn't it?
(SPEAKING OWN LANGUAGE)
Toling? So this came after the Chinese invasion?
- How old is this? This is an ancient piece? - Very ancient.
- From 1,000 years, maybe. - More than that.
This is from Toling monastery, the greatest monastery of all in western Tibet.
- Yes, yes. - They brought it over the mountains
after the destruction during the Cultural Revolution.
It's very heavy.
Wow! It's absolutely amazing. Just look at that.
So this has been deliberately smashed, deliberately broken.
- Can the lama tell us what the image is? - (SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE)
- It is a Bodhisattva. - A Bodhisattva.
It seemed that every nook and cranny was crammed with books and works of art
saved from the Chinese destruction of old Tibet.
(MICHAEL) 900 years old?
You come to a place like this and it's the reality of the legend.
It's an amazing... This is like a cultural rescue operation, isn't it?
(TSEWANG) Exactly. The Tibetan culture, it is living here.
(MICHAEL) It's living here! Just amazing, isn't it?
The lama then took me to see more secrets of the monastery.
So we're going to go into the monastic bit of these buildings.
This is a communal area where the dramas are done
but this is the prayer hall of the monastery.
For me, it was all uncannily like a scene in Hilton's tale of Shangri-La...
..when the lama shows Conway the library where the wisdom of the world is preserved.
(MICHAEL) So these are the old sutras?
And then the lama reveals his vision,
to save the treasures of humanity for future generations.
This, he says, is why Shangri-La is here.
(MICHAEL) Wow! God, this is amazing.
(SPEAKING OWN LANGUAGE)
He has heard about Shambala,
- that it exists in a remote area, people living... - Yeah.
He has heard about this.
So does he think Shambala is a real place or is it place of the spirit?
- It really exists. - It really exists!
- There is a text that describes it. - Fantastic. It really exists.
From Jhang, we joined a caravan of yak herders heading towards Tibet,
hoping that we'd get through before the snows came.
(WOMAN SHOUTING)
And I found myself musing on how the visions of myth find their echoes in history,
how ancient stories can still shadow our modern hopes and dreams.
Later that day, we were met by an honour guard sent by the next village.
- Hello! - (DRUMS BANG)
Very nice to meet you! Hello!
(HARNESS BELLS JINGLE)
(DRUM BEATING)
Well, just look at that. Isn't that stupendous?
It's completely... A hidden valley. Look at it.
Hello.
And so we arrived at the monastery of Halji.
Halji was founded from Toling, the mother monastery, in the 10th century,
the very time when the legend first appears.
- Welcome to you! - (DRUMS AND CYMBALS BEAT)
So if there was a real Shangri-La, this place is its living descendant.
You can't believe that things like this still survive in the 21st century. It's unbelievable.
It can only have survived because of its total isolation, can't it?
(CHANTING)
In the past, different worlds, different conceptions of time and space,
could live side by side on our earth.
But not any more.
We're modern people now, we've had our revolutions and our reformations
and now time races in one line, headlong forward,
past recedes from us ever faster
and we think we've freed ourselves from the great circle of time.
We're one world now, even here.
(MEN CONVERSING IN OWN LANGUAGE)
They are demanding electricity, micro-hydro, phone...
We will take the message back, yeah? Yeah. Yeah.
It's really interesting, isn't it?
They absolutely want electricity and the micro-hydro...
- And telephone. - And telephone.
0ur journey led us higher now, into a cold, bleak zone,
where even in the sun we were chilled to the bone.
(MAN SHOUTING ENCOURAGEMENT)
These are valleys where hermits come to commune with the spirits
and to seek their own kind of immortality.
(PLAINTIVE CRY)
Hello. Thank you.
Hello.
(MICHAEL) God!
What an incredible place!
Absolutely amazing place.
We're more than 4,000 metres here and look at...
You're into this border zone of the sacred geography of the subcontinent of India.
There's monks in these caves out there!
This is where their gurus come out to the wildest caves in the Himalayas.
And there, if you look over there at these great, black teeth,
6,500 metres, more than 21,000 feet, those,
and behind them, Gurla Mandhata, 25,000 feet,
and Kailash just beyond there, that's Tibet there.
We're right on the very edge of the zone where human beings have ever lived.
- What's this? - Chang. You want to take?
- Will it be good? - If you have the stomach...
- The water is very pure. - The water will be good.
- Your good health. Holy water. - Manasarovar water.
Chang is home-made barley beer. It's served cold out of old plastic jerry cans.
It's not very appetising on a chill grey afternoon and it's not a very good idea at this altitude.
Til is the village at the end of world, desperately poor and isolated.
But its people still see hospitality as a sacred duty and a real pleasure.
(GREETINGS IN LOCAL LANGUAGE)
Ah!
Ah, fantastic. Thank you very much.
- (MAN) Ah! - Thank you.
We'd got here just in time.
In a few days, the snow will fall and Til will be cut off for the next five months.
That evening, we paid our respects to the legendary abbot of Til.
He's famous for having practised incredible austerities, meditating for years on end.
That's why he's so revered, he's like a saint.
Thank you very much.
(LAUGHTER AND CHATTER)
(SHRILL SINGING)
Duty done, it was drinks all round and time for party games.
And in Til, that means tug of war.
Am I all right with my woolly hat?
The girls challenge the boys, guests included, of course.
All under the eye of the great lama himself.
(DRUM BEATING)
(CROWD CHEERING)
I didn't think I was going to do that!
- (MICHAEL) Come on, next challenger! - (CHEERING)
- (VOICES ECHO AND DISTORT) - Thank you, thank you.
By now, with the altitude and all that chang, my mind was swimming.
But the abbot's serene consciousness never wavered.
(DRUM BEATS OUT RHYTHM)
Next morning, while the men slept off their hangovers,
the women saddled up our horses and sent us on our way.
'Just follow the path all the way to China, '' they said.
''You can't miss it. ''
All day the path went up and down and up and down.
Soon every step was an effort.
But it must've been much worse for the first seeker, the Jesuit Andrade,
sick and snow-blind, in agonies of frostbite.
''It took us 20 days to get into Tibet,'' he says,
''because ranges of terrible mountains blocked the way.
''Every day around four o'clock, the snow came in,'' he says,
''and we lost all feeling in our hands and feet.
''There was no firewood and worst of all,'' Andrade writes, ''was the biting wind.''
The only food they got in the mountains, he says, was roast barley meal,
which they mixed with water.
That was all they had, just like the Tibetan nomads.
We're a bit like that ourselves tonight because our horses have not caught up with us
and it's already quite late.
Our sleeping bags and our food and pretty much everything is with them,
so we're going to have a cold and hungry night.
It's sort of chewy and tasteless
but if you're stuck on the edge of Tibet, it's subzero and the snow's starting...
it's OK.
One day, greed and ignorance will lay waste to the earth itself
and an evil king will triumph and spread his power over all human kind.
But just when it seems there is nothing left to conquer,
the mists will lift to reveal the icy mountains of Shambala.
Then the king of Shambala will ride out and overthrow the forces of evil...
..and wisdom will at last be enthroned on earth.
(MAN) Heh!
But after a bitter night came an ethereal dawn.
And what a feeling it was to be on top of the world.
At last, we saw what must be one of the loneliest border posts in the world,
the crossing into western Tibet.
(INAUDIBLE)
..most wonderful, wonderful...
0ur plan was to cross the high plateau of Tibet behind the Himalayas,
to rejoin the route taken by Andrade on his journey from India.
(MICHAEL) It feels even better when you've nearly killed yourself climbing those passes!
And now we entered the most mythic landscape on earth.
A world teeming with sacred peaks, lakes and rivers.
At its centre, the eerie white pyramid of the holy mountain, Kailash.
A mirror of the crystal peak in the ancient legends and the tale of Shangri-La.
But for us, paradise was here and now,
a real bed for the night.
Oh, really? (LAUGHS)
This is Lake Manasarovar.
In Indian myth, along with Kailash, the lake is the centre of the world.
According to Tibetan legend, the lake is a gateway of the spirits.
The sound of the ice squeaking and breaking
is the noise of demons rising from the underworld.
As night fell, the myth became real for me.
It may be freezing and barren here, not paradise as you might imagine it,
but it is heaven on earth.
When the god Siva married his great love Parvati, daughter of the snows,
he said to her, ''Where shall we fly to enjoy our wedding night?
''I can take you wherever you desire, anywhere in the universe.''
And Parvati replied, ''Thank you for your generosity, my lord.
''Your power and wisdom are known to everyone.
''But if you come with me, I can take you to paradise.''
And that night, she took him to the crystal mountain by the sacred lake,
where wild animals are tame in the presence of holy saints and sages.
She took him to Mount Kailash, saying, ''This is the only true paradise on earth.''
And there, they first made love.
In the West, we've completely lost the idea of a sacred landscape,
but across Asia it's one of the most important religious ideas.
And we're about to reach the holiest place of all.
Everest may be higher, but in the mythic stakes Kailash reigns supreme.
To climb it would be sacrilege.
You set off from the great flagpole and you walk 30 miles round its base,
prostrating yourself as you go.
This is set up on the full moon of each May/June to begin the pilgrimage season
when thousands of people do the circuit of the mountain
in the belief that this is the axis of the universe.
And it's not such a crazy idea because in this tiny area of western Tibet
four of the great rivers of Asia rise: the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Sutlej
and the Karnali, which feeds the Ganges, the holiest river of India.
If anywhere's a sacred place on this earth, then this surely is.
The pilgrims' reward is a bath in the hot springs of Tirthapuri.
Ah!
(LAUGHS)
This is what I call pilgrimage!
Bloody hell. (SIGHS)
(LAUGHTER)
After 250 miles on dirt tracks, we finally came out behind the Himalayas
at the point where Andrade crossed into Tibet nearly 400 years ago.
That's India over there. In the middle, the great pyramid of Nanda Devi
and just to the right, the cluster of Indian sacred peaks,
Joshimath, Badrinath, Gangotri
and the Mana Pass, just there.
Andrade was met by mysterious ambassadors, who gave him horses
and led him down into a vast labyrinth of canyons.
And for us, now, there was an almost electric feeling of anticipation.
0nly a handful of outsiders have seen this since Andrade arrived here in 1624.
A city, literally built out of a mountain.
''The people came into the streets and women crowded the balconies
''to see us strange creatures, like people from another world.''
They were the first Europeans to cross the Himalayas and make contact
with the ancient civilization of Tibet.
So these are the two monasteries, the white and the red?
The white temple and the red temple.
But this wasn't the lost Christian civilization the Europeans had expected to find.
What they discovered was Tsaparang, the capital of the Buddhist kingdom of Guge,
founded in the 9th century, just before the legend of Shambala first appears.
As you climb and you look at this hidden valley,
hidden from the rest of the world until the 17th century,
you really begin to understand how a legend could've arisen.
From the beginning, the city had been intended by its builders to be a hidden place.
1,000 years ago, when Tibet was torn apart by civil war,
the city was created by a branch of the Tibetan royal family as a refuge,
set apart from the outside world, where its Buddhist rulers could follow the Wheel of Law
unharmed by the revolutions of history.
God! Have you seen this?
So this is the King of Guge's private chambers.
And er...just come and have a look at the view
that the king enjoyed.
How about that?
In 1624, this was a network of sparkling canals between green fields and fruit orchards,
a garden in the desert,
paradise.
Its rulers so open to the newcomers that they let them build a church and preach Christianity.
But as so often in history, the arrival of the Europeans was the beginning of the end.
The neighbouring rulers of Ladakh were angry that the Christians had been let in
and they made war on the King of Tsaparang.
In 1685, the city was finally sieged and destroyed.
(STRAINING)
Its royal family, men, women and children, were beheaded.
Their bodies were dumped in this cave.
There's a chamber here
and there's an inner chamber.
Bones, cloth...
Preserved in the dry air, they're still here
and still smell.
These are the remains of the bodies of the royal family,
the king and queen and the children, ministers and generals of the last king of the Guge.
But that's not the end of the story.
Tsaparang's temples, among the most beautiful in all of Asia, weren't destroyed.
A handful of local families and monks continued to tend them
and they lasted almost to our own time.
So all these figures survived until the 1960s, then, did they?
- Destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. - It's heartbreaking, isn't it?
Er...
- You're not allowed inside, I'm afraid, Sean. - OK.
- Sorry. - Is this OK?
In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its rage against religion,
these wonderful things were smashed.
The Chinese regret it now but what remains is just a fleeting glimpse of a lost world.
(MICHAEL) And date of temple? What, 15th century?
And the meaning of the myth?
The Tibetans say that each of us can live in Shangri-La
if we can only conquer the restless need
that makes us dream of paradise in worlds other than our own.
James Hilton imagined Shangri-La here in Tibet
but if you ask me, paradise can be found anywhere on this earth
but only on this earth.
And it's in our hands whether we make it or destroy it.
When he left Shangri-La, Conway felt the surge of darkness around him,
as if the world outside were already brewing for the storm.
''We have a dream, '' the lama had told him.
''Even the most beautiful things are transient and perishable.
''War, lust and brutality will crush them till nothing is left.
''That is why Shangri-La is here.
''To preserve the wisdom men will need when their violent passions are spent. ''
0ur journey was over.
A few days later, we crossed from Tibet into Nepal
and were taken back...to our world.