Location
Shangrila Town, Daocheng County, Ganzi, Sichuan
Daocheng Yading guards three holy mountains — ...
Daocheng Yading guards three holy mountains — Xiannairi, Yangmaiyong and Xianuoduoji — while Milk Lake and Five-Color Lake lie quietly among the hills at 4,600 meters. This is "the last pure land on the blue planet": in 1928 the American explorer Joseph Rock arrived and marveled, and his reports directly shaped the world's imagination of "Shangri-La."
In 1928 Joseph Rock, explorer of the National Geographic Society, entered Yading by way of Muli and stood shaken before the three snow peaks; in National Geographic he wrote: "I would rather die among these beautiful mountains than lie on a sickbed in America." The snow mountains, monasteries and gorges he described became one of the prototypes of "Shangri-La" in James Hilton's Lost Horizon.
Xiannairi (6,032 m) sits like a great Buddha — its Tibetan name means "Avalokiteshvara"; Yangmaiyong (5,958 m), sharp as a sword, is "Manjushri"; Xianuoduoji (5,958 m), forceful and upright, is "Vajrapani." The three peaks stand in a triangle; Tibetans revere them as the three bodhisattvas guarding Yading, and pilgrims circle them without end — a rare snow-mountain group laid out to the three principal bodhisattvas of Buddhism.
愿此行终有一日，见山仍是山，见水仍是水。 — "May this journey one day bring us to see mountains as mountains, and waters as waters."—— A traveler's inscription
From Luorong Pasture, ride or climb the steep slopes to Milk Lake — an old glacial lake shaped like a scallop, its water milky blue, ringed by snow peaks; climb on to Five-Color Lake, where algae and travertine on the lakebed conjure five colors in the sun. The lawns of Conggu Monastery, the reflections at Pearl Lake, the yaks and prayer flags of Luorong Pasture make a single day's line from the human world to fairyland. The altitude bites hard, but it is worth coming back again and again.