The Secret of Shangri-La: Agricultural Travels and the Rise of Organic Farming Discourse

For the valley was nothing than an enclosed paradise of amazing fertility, in which the vertical difference of a few thousand feet spanned the whole gulf between temperate and tropic. Crops of unusual diversity grew in profusion and contiguity, with not an inch of ground untended.

—James Hilton, Lost Horizon

No Chinese peasant . . . goes to town without bringing back, at either end of his bamboo pole, two buckets filled with unmentionable matter; and it is thanks to this human manure that the Chinese earth is as fruitful as in the ways of Abraham.

—Victor Hugo, Les misérables

The publication of English novelist James Hilton's Lost Horizon in 1933 was the culmination of a tradition that began with the thirteenth-century Travels of Marco Polo's romantic definition of the Orient as an earthly paradise. Like the Garden of Eden, Marco Polo's China, and Hilton's Shangri-La evoke the imagery of an everlasting land of milk and honey for Euro-American readers. Unlike their Western counterpart, however, the pastoral harmony of these Eastern utopias is characterized by its economic self-sufficiency rather than its leisurely temperament. Shangri-La, and the Orient in general, has come to embody a mecca of fertility and abundance. For early twentieth-century American agricultural scientist F. H. King (1848-1911), English botanist Albert Howard (1873-1947), and English physician Robert McCarrison (1878-1960), interestingly, Shangri-La was something more than the product of a simple, orientalist celebration of rurality. Traveling extensively in the Far East and British colonial India at a time when "lost horizon" had become a household term, these organic pioneers similarly identified China, Japan, Korea, India, and the princely state Hunza as stellar inspirations for agricultural recuperation and spiritual renewal. On their agricultural expeditions, they postulated the "wheel of health," a reenvisioned Buddhist wheel of dharma ("dharmachakra" ["wheel of law"]), as a nomenclature for the whole complex of idealism constituting the organic method of cultivation. The wheel of dharma, an ancient symbol for endless rebirth, suggests a sense of interconnectedness and continuity that became the necessary panacea to the reductionism of modern Western industrial farming practices. As the legacy of the bountiful Shangri-La, the wheel of health calls forth the ecological concept of the food web and hence the value of enriching the soil and completing the circle of life by returning human manure to the earth in farming. Though King, Howard, and McCarrison's formulation of organic agriculture discourse depended on their fantasy of Asia as a timeless land of moral and physical perfection, Asia nonetheless provided them the epistemological and ethical foundation needed for imagining an alternative relationship with nature that is grounded in both use and respect.

Ever since the publication of James Hilton's Lost Horizon, Shangri-La, evoking a vision of a primitive and exotic Orient, has fired the Western imagination as a mythical, earthly paradise. Sitting on top of the loftiest part of the world, the Tibetan plateau, Shangri-La, for Hilton's readers, is undoubtedly a Himalayan utopia where "one enjoyed a sufficiency of everything he could reasonably desire," a long-lost Oriental paradise whose remoteness has protected its dignity.¹ Despite knowing that Shangri-La was a total invention of Hilton's, Western readers and explorers followed the steps of Hilton's protagonist Hugh Conway, veteran of the British diplomatic service in British India, into the mountains of Tibet in pursuit of a fertile paradise he discovered after a plane crash. As critic Gang Yue notes in "Fragments of Shangri-La: 'Eco-Tibet' and Its Global Circuit," a green Tibet, or a green Asia, "projects a 'green orientalism' that has transformed the land of snows, coded in dark brown and still under the occupation of the Reds, into a Shangri-La of deep green."² Shangri-La has come to play an integral role in the shaping of Western environmentalist imagining of the East.

Ever since the emergence of the 1960s and '70s New Age counterculture, organic agriculture has been understood in the British and American popular imagination as...