Shangri-La and History in 1930s England.pdf

Buddhist Studies Review 24(1) 2007, 108–20

ISSN (print): 0256–2897

doi: 10.1558/bsrv.v24i1.108

ISSN (online): 1747–9681

Shangri-La and History in 1930s England

LAWRENCE NORMAND

School of Arts and Education, Middlesex University, Trent Park, London N14 4YZ

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses the question of the existence and transmission of

Buddhism in British culture in the 1930s. It argues that Buddhism found channels of

transmission through popular culture, such as James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon .

Lost Horizon can be understood historically in relation to current Western ideas about

Buddhism, and in response to the sense of historical crisis of Western modernity. This

paper also shows that elements of a more genuine Buddhism are extracted from ori-

entalist materials and deployed by Hilton in ways that make the novel a carrier of

quasi-Buddhist ideas.

This paper addresses the question of how Buddhism continued to exist as an in ﬂ u-

ence in British culture after the demise of Theosophy from around 1930. Within

Theosophy’s strange religio-historical system, Buddhism had occupied a privi-

leged place; and indeed Theosophy had been a major transmitter of knowledge

about Buddhism since its establishment in 1875. From 1930, however, Theosophy

found itself weakened by splits and defections, and, more signi ﬁ cantly, its mes-

sage of individual spirituality and political quietism came to seem inadequate in

the face of the highly politicised world in the 1930s, and the rise of new religious

and political organisations such as Moral Rearmament and the Communist Party

(Washington 1993, 283).

What Philip Almond has called ‘an enormous upsurge in awareness of, and

interest in, Buddhism in late Victorian England’ (Almond 1988, 1), did not con-

tinue with comparable intensity into the ﬁ rst decades of the twentieth century

when the methods of dissemination of Eastern religions were also gradually

changing. The Buddhist Society (established 1906) was slowly creating a public

presence for the religion through its organisation and publications, though it

remained small. In the early decades of the twentieth century, some in ﬂ uential

modernist writers and artists drew on Eastern ideas and imagery in their eﬀ orts

to renew their societies, including W. B. Yeats and Wassily Kandinsky, though

their audiences were initially con ﬁ ned to cultural elites (Clarke 1997, 100–105).

Buddhism and other Eastern belief-systems continued to have a signi ﬁ cant

and growing presence in early twentieth-century culture; and new methods of

transmission developed that extended their reach beyond academic and artistic

circles.

NORMAND SHANGRI-LA AND HISTORY IN 1930s ENGLAND

109

As J. J. Clarke has observed, the interaction between East and West in the twen-

tieth century became more and more ‘a matter of complex interaction between

cultures, involving a variety of interweaving agendas and ideological interests,

rather than simply a matter of remote projection by one culture upon another’

(Clarke 1997, 100). A popular novel published in 1933, Lost Horizon by James Hilton

(1900–1954), may stand as a case-study of some of the complex ways in which

East–West cultural interaction began to work in the twentieth century, and of the

kind of ‘ideological interests’ that were involved in the process.

LOST HORIZON AND ORIENTALISM

Lost Horizon ’s importance as a disseminator of orientalism in Britain in the 1930s

– and beyond – lies partly in its being a popular novel aimed at a wide readership,

and in showing the presence of Buddhism running through popular as well as

elite culture. James Hilton, who took an English degree at Cambridge University,

and then worked as a journalist, wrote twenty-two novels between 1920 and 1953,

including the enormously popular Good-Bye Mr Chips (1934); and from 1935 was a

highly successful Hollywood screenwriter. Lost Horizon tells the story of a Tibetan

monastery, Shangri-La, and a group of Westerners who are kidnapped and taken

there. Hilton gave the English language a new name, Shangri-La, for an imaginary

utopia; and he created a myth that entered the culture. The novel has a Tibetan

setting and appears to treat Buddhist themes, but its Shangri-La is no ordinary

Tibetan monastery, for its personnel is mostly foreign, including European; it

is full of the ﬁ nest examples of Western, not Eastern, culture; and it seems to

be little concerned with the actual religious beliefs or practices of the region.

This seems to con ﬁ rm Peter Bishop’s comment that the novel was ‘one of the

great mythologizings about Tibet [for it] gathered the threads of fantasy [about

Tibet], shaped them, articulated them’ (Bishop 1989, 211). Donald S. Lopez goes

further in seeing Lost Horizon as a typical Western version of Tibet ‘in which the

West perceives some lack within itself and fantasizes that the answer, through

a process of projection, is to be found somewhere in the East’ (Lopez 1998, 6).

Such critiques are valuable in reminding us of the dominant orientalist way in

which the idea of ‘Tibet’ has been formed in the West through Western images

and fantasies. And indeed Hilton drew on such cultural fantasies to characterise

his Tibetan location. 1

However, Western images of the East are not fully accounted for by analyses

that focus on Western representations as mere fantasies. Within texts shaped

1. For discussions of Western views of Tibet see Bishop (1989; 1993) and Lopez (1998). For a discus-

sion of Lost Horizon in this context see Bishop (1989, 211, 216–18). The theoretical basis for much

of Lopez’s and Bishop’s analyses can be found in Said 1978. Post-Saidian theories of East–West

relations, which identify them as more reciprocal and two-way, can be found in Clarke (1997)

and MacKenzie (1995).

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BUDDHIST STUDIES REVIEW

by Western stereotypes there may also be fragments of authentic knowledge, or

traces of ideological counter-currents, sometimes resulting from the resistance

of Asian material to European fantasies. Western images may be predominantly

stereotypical or fantastic, but lodged within them may be signs of the actualities

of Tibet and Buddhism, which thereby become communicable to Western read-

ers. Lost Horizon is mostly composed from Western stereotypes and fantasies of

Tibet, but it also reshapes them, and extracts from them some more authentic

elements. These may be fragmentary, distorted or incomplete but they show how

knowledge of and – equally importantly – sympathy for Buddhism were carried

into the culture.

Lost Horizon won the Hawthornden Prize in 1934, became a bestseller and the

ﬁ rst book to be published in paperback (in 1939); and it has been in print almost

continuously up to the present day, in some dozen editions. In 1937 Frank Capra

directed a successful ﬁ lm version of the book, but it is the novel that is discussed

here even though the ﬁ lm sent some unforgettable images into circulation. I

want to argue that the novel’s images and ideas of the East, formed largely from

Western materials, represent attempts to address problems of the West, spe-

ci ﬁ cally historical problems of the 1930s: namely, revulsion at the destruction

wrought by the First World War, fear of another looming war and, more gener-

ally, loss of faith in the future of the modern world.

Hilton had a rich array of oriental material to explore, including other novels,

and accounts of travellers, mountaineers and ethnographers; and these versions

of Asia were already shaped by Western ideologies to produce images of the East

that re ﬂ ected Western preoccupations. His novel was largely produced from such

materials pre-shaped to suit Western readers who were already practised at read-

ing them. This is one reason why Lost Horizon made ready sense to large numbers

of people, and is why it can be called popular. But despite such familiar cultural

processing, something of the distinctiveness of Buddhist values and ideas does

emerge into the novel such that it becomes one of the carriers of a Buddhism

– albeit a pastiche Buddhism – in the twentieth century.

Here is a brief outline of the story. A group of Westerners ﬁ nds itself endan-

gered by a native rebellion in a Far Eastern country in the early 1930s. The

English consul, Conway, manages to escape along with three others in the last

plane to leave the place. But as they are ﬂ ying to safety they realise they are

going in the wrong direction towards and then over Tibet, but they are helpless

to do anything. Eventually the plane runs out of fuel and they crash high in the

Kuen Lun mountains. All they can do is await their deaths. But then a procession

appears through the snowstorm, and its leader, a Chinese named Chang, invites

them to the nearby monastery of Shangri-La. Having no choice, the Westerners

do as he suggests. Shangri-La is perched high above a lush mountain valley,

and turns out to be a place of extraordinary comfort and re ﬁ nement, materi-

ally, aesthetically and spiritually. The Westerners evince a range of attitudes to

the place where they ﬁ nd themselves against their will, with Conway’s subordi-

nate in the diplomatic service, Mallinson, being particularly hostile and eager

NORMAND SHANGRI-LA AND HISTORY IN 1930s ENGLAND

111

to leave. But departure is impossible, and gradually some of the Westerners ﬁ nd

themselves attracted to the life of Shangri-La. Conway in particular is drawn

to the place, which he discusses in conversation with Chang. To Chang’s sur-

prise, Conway is invited to meet the high lama, who, over several meetings, tells

him the remarkable history of Shangri-La that began with the arrival at the

Buddhist monastery of a French priest, Father Perrault, in the eighteenth cen-

tury. Over the decades Perrault was joined by representatives of other European

nationalities who decided to stay there, as well as a young Chinese princess.

Conway eventually realises that the high lama he is speaking to is none other

than the Father Perrault who ﬁ rst arrived in the valley two centuries before.

Conway faces a further shock when he is oﬀ ered the position of high lama after

the present one dies, which he promptly does there and then. Wishing to stay

and accept the oﬀ er of becoming high lama, Conway nevertheless feels respon-

sible for returning the others to the West. This con ﬂ ict reaches its climax when

Mallinson announces that he has fallen in love with the Chinese princess, and

they plan to escape. Impelled by duty, and against his deeper feelings, Conway

helps everyone escape. The story ends with Conway’s desperate wish to return

unful ﬁ lled, and the last we hear of him he is trying to rediscover the wherea-

bouts of Shangri-La. Conway’s inability to return to Shangri-La constitutes it as

a lost object of fantasy, and creates a structure in which his – and by extension

the reader’s – desire for what Shangri-La symbolises is forever unful ﬁ lled. (The

ﬁ lm, by contrast, has Conway return to Shangri-La.)

MOUNTAINS, SPIRITUALITY, BUDDHISM

The novel’s popular appeal, that is its readability, lies partly in Hilton’s deploy-

ment of a number of motifs that were already familiar in British culture about

the East and Buddhism. Tibet illustrates the point, for the novel’s Tibet owes lit-

tle to the historical or social conditions of the early-twentieth-century country,

and more to well-worn Western discourses, which turn it into something imagi-

nary. The Victorians’ fascination with Tibet resulted in many accounts of it, so

that it was already lodged in Western culture as, among other things, a location

of complex wisdom. It ﬁ gured in Theosophy as the homeland of the Mahatmas,

the great souls who maintained the spiritual secrets of occult religion. When

Conan Doyle has to ﬁ nd a place for Sherlock Holmes to hide out he sends him oﬀ

to Tibet. H. Rider Haggard in She (1887) ﬁ gures Central Asia and Tibet as places

‘where, if anywhere upon this earth wisdom is to be found’ (Haggard 1951, 4); and

sets the sequel there, Ayesha: The Return of She (1905). Hilton’s Tibet connects with

these pre-existing ideas that make Shangri-La interpretable in terms of remote-

ness, secrecy and wisdom. He had no need to invent this because it was already to

hand. By reading Lost Horizon to discover these familiar motifs it is possible to see

how truisms about the East and Buddhism (which may, of course, contain truths)

were put to use for Western readers.

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BUDDHIST STUDIES REVIEW

For early-twentieth-century Europeans, mountaineering was charged with

spiritual signi ﬁ cance, often in reaction to their sense of the exhausted state of

post-war Europe. There were connections in European minds among mountains,

spirituality and, in relation to climbing Everest, Buddhism. The Englishman Sir

Francis Younghusband claimed that climbing Everest would ‘elevate the human

spirit’, and show that men ‘were getting the upper hand on the earth, and …

acquiring a true mastery of their surroundings’ (cited in Hansen 1996, 718). When

European climbers approached Everest, they found Buddhist monasteries and

abbots from whom they had to win permission to attempt a climb; and when

they wrote up their exploits they also wrote about these monasteries. By think-

ing about Buddhism within this cultural complex, we can see how knowledge of

Buddhism might be mediated as it came to the West. An anthropologist of the

region, Sherry B. Ortner, has written that ‘the sahibs were fascinated by their vis-

its to the monasteries – to Rumbu on the northern (Tibetan) route to Everest and

later to Tengboche on the southern (Nepal) side’. The head lama of Rumbu monas-

tery, Zatul Rimpoche, ‘oﬀ ered … warm hospitality’ to foreign climbers, so that the

‘visit to Rumbu became … a ﬁ xture of the early expeditions’ (Ortner 1997, 149–50).

The British climber J. B. L. Noel wrote about the ill-fated 1924 British expedition

in his book Through Tibet to Everest (1927), where he describes witnessing Buddhist

practices in the monastery, as well as his meeting with the head lama. Noel’s

attitude is notably respectful of the foreign religion, and he emphasises both the

lama’s cultural strangeness as well as his penetrating spiritual power:

A ﬁ gure sat with crossed knees in the Buddha posture. There were dra-

peries of costly Chinese silks. The ﬁ gure sat absolutely motionless and

silent. Not a soul spoke a word, or even whispered in the room … He

looked at us, but did not speak or move. Rather he seemed to look over

us, through us. There was something vastly observant and yet imper-

sonal in his gaze. (Noel 1927, 145-6)

Noel is a sympathetic reporter despite his public-school values (his commit-

ment to ‘sport’ causes incomprehension among the Tibetans), and he writes from

a recognisably twentieth-century position of cultural relativism that also informs

Hilton’s novel. This marks both Noel and Hilton as examplars of what Edward

Said identi ﬁ es as a twentieth-century modernist orientalism that responded

with more sympathy to oriental peoples and experienced more self-doubt about

supposed occidental superiority than nineteenth-century writers, and depicted

East–West encounters in an ironic light. 2 Noel declares after the meeting with the

high lama, ‘I felt absolutely hypnotized myself ’, but he adds a remark from his

2. Said (1994, 227). Said identi ﬁ es Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, André Malraux and T. E. Lawrence

as among those twentieth-century writers who ‘take narrative from the triumphalist experi-

ence of imperialism into the extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality,

and corrosive irony, whose formal patterns we have come to recognize as the hallmarks of

modernist culture’.

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