ABSTRACT
The area now known as Shangrila has been imagined, or ‘made up’, in very different terms over the past decades, as China has gone through radical transformations. Struggles for power have driven violent social upheavals, but have also permeated more subtle processes of change. This chapter outlines a local history of these struggles, highlighting the crucial links between place-making and concomitant struggles over spatial representation, and the enforcement of social order and associated power struggles. In so doing, this chapter also identifies several different and in many respects competing place-making strategies and discourses, which will be detailed further in the following chapters. The different place-making discourses are described here in relation to each other, because it is precisely in reference to a history of conflicting social and spatial relations that contemporary place-making is made meaningful.1
