Luxury hotel chain Shangri-La announced that it would be coming to its namesake region in China September 9 — but is Shangri-La’s Shangri-La the real deal? The chain has broken ground on a 230-room city resort in Diqing, a city in Shangri-La country in the Chinese province of Yunnan, set to open in early 2013. The new low-rise resort will feature guest rooms that average 40 square meters in size and several Chinese and speciality restaurants, along with a health club, spa and beauty salon and indoor lap pool at the hotel. Shangri-La was first described by James Hilton in a 1933 novel entitled Lost Horizon — and rather disappointingly for guests of the Shangri-La hotel, it was a fictional place, inhabited by mystical, almost immortal people.
