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Philip Spiess
[A cultural footnote on the name "Shangri-La":
The name originated with the British novelist James Hilton in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon; he loosely based his Utopian novel on two 1840s travelogues about Tibet in the British Museum library. The novel, being very popular, was immortalized in Frank Capra's 1937 film, Lost Horizon, starring Ronald Colman, H. B. Warner, and Sam Jaffe; the film was remade in 1973 as a semi-musical with much less success, starring Peter Finch, John Gielgud, and Charles Boyer. (The much-remarked on sets were remade from King Arthur's lath-and-plaster castle in the 1967 film version of the Lerner & Lowe musical, Camelot).
On another front, Herbert Hoover's presidential fishing camp on the Rapidan River in Shenandoah National Park, on the Skyline Drive, Virginia (which can still be visited at certain times during the summer), was inaccessible to the wheel chair-bound Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so he established a new presidential camp outside of Washington, D. C., in the mountains near Thurmont, Maryland; he named the camp "Shangri-La" after the popular Hilton novel. President Truman apparently kept this name, but when Dwight Eisenhower became president in 1953, he renamed the presidential camp "Camp David" after his grandson, David Eisenhower (married to Julie Nixon). That name stands to this day.
On yet a third front, the People's Republic of China, recognizing the financial benefits of American tourism in China, in 2001 renamed its county of Zhongdian, in Yunnan province, "Xianggelila," which apparently means "Shangri-La" (or its equivalent) in Chinese. But apparently other parts of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, as well as Tibet, have claimed to be "the real Shangri-La." So Dave, which "Shangri-La" were you in? ]
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