Perhaps more than any other part of China, Tibet has been romanticized and mythologized. In its various forms, Tibet is read, represented, and imagined as the sacred place of Buddhism, the origin of wisdom of life, the abode inhabited by world-controlling masters, the source of superhuman power, an endangered archive of humanity, a Shangri-La, and a timeless utopia where the span of human life could be restored to its imagined longevity. Tibet is a landscape, a fictional space, and an idea. Is it a real place, or is it what Orville Schell has aptly called a ‘Virtual Tibet’? Indeed, is there such a place called ‘Tibet’ as we know it? In thinking about the discursive formation of the idea of Tibet, therefore, we must also consider human consequences of the efforts to fictionalize place, landscape, and geography. Tibet is a historical space to which human dramas have given not just meaning and value, but also a rich range of possibilities for its interpretation, representation, and utilization. In one sense, there is no nature except human nature, and there is no place that is not at the same time physical and cultural. Tibet, as we know it, has acquired different identities and manifestations, just as many other places of historical and cultural significance. If Tibet is not just a mark on the map, but a historical invention and geographical imaginary for different contexts, it is not one Tibet, but multiple Tibets that we must consider.

There has been copious critical and historical analysis of how Tibet is invented and transformed into a utopia of spiritual fulfillment by committed missionaries, ambitious adventurers, imperialist agents, and New Age spiritualists. In this collective narrative of Tibet, the British empire played a singular role in the constituting of an official structure of knowledge about Tibet, of what Edward Said has called a ‘corporate institution’, in which to understand, discuss, represent, and deal with Tibet. Orientalist romanticization of Tibet emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and culminated in the creation of Shangri-La in James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon (1933).