Translating "Shangri-La" into Chinese

Every time I visit a hotel called "Shangri-La" in Asia, I am disturbed.

"Shangri-La" is, of course, a nonsense syllable name--made up on the shores of the North Atlantic in the 1930s to sound Chinese (or perhaps Tibetan), but it is not a Chinese (or Tibetan) name.

So how do you translate "Shangri-La" into Chinese?

What do the Chinese characters written alongside "Shangri-La Hotel" mean?

And why did Asia never invent the teacup handle? Saucer, yes. Teacup cover to keep the tea warm, yes. But no handle. Why not?

The answer to the second question in unknown. The answer to the first question is that the Chinese for "Shangri-La" (a) sounds somewhat like "Shangri-La" and (b) means something like, "refuge of relaxation and pleasant fragrances."

Comments

[Gerhard Fritz]

Just plain Asian superiority, Prof. THEY know from millennia how to wandle their teacups without getting their fingers and/or lips burned. You are probably on CCTV, with half the hotel staff roaring with laughter while watching you struggling with your teacup. Just us stupid Westerners need everything with handlebars.

Its for the aame reasons that their electronic products come with out-of-this-world handbooks with translations nobody understands.

[Tomas]

Ill ask my wife when she comes home, I am certain she has an opinion on the topic.

[Feng-Ji]

I met you in Singapore earlier today at the Ministry of Finance.

Chinese tea was originally drunk either from a large bowl-like cup with a lid (where the tea is brewed), or from the teapot straight.

For the former, the mouth is large (making it easy to hold with two fingers) and you actually need the lid to sieve out the tea leaves. Hence, having a handle is actually slightly redundant.

Teapots were used with cups only relatively recently (i.e. last 200 years.) If cups are used, the cups are typically very small and ran little risk of burning your hands.

Phonetically Shangrila translates to Xiang1 Ge2 Li3 La1. The first word means Fragance - the remaining words are nonsense when strung together. (Literally Fragant Standard Inside Pull) But I thought a nicer way of translating it is a place of great fragrance and relaxation.

[Tom McGahagan]

Cup handles -- see William J. Bernstein, _A Splendid Exchange_, p. 266:

Tea served without sugar and not very warm in China; in Europe, in order to
dissolve the sugar, the tea was served hot.

[vtcodger]

Chinese words are, I am assured, all one syllable. So Chinese (and Japanese which got much of its vocabulary from China) have a lot of homonyms compared to Western languages. I'd imagine that there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to write Shangrila in Chinese.

Are you sure that "Shangrila" is a nonsense name? I only know about a dozen "words" of Chinese. But one of them is mountain="Shan". Could be coincidence. Or could be that James Hilton(?) or some earlier source got the name from a Chinese speaker.

[JJ]

My guess is it's a bastardization of the Tibetan "Shambhala":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala#Western_fascination

But apparently it does translate directly into Tibetan as "Shang Mountain Pass":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangri-La#Etymology_of_Shangri-La

[JJ]

Looks like you could take a walk across campus at Berkeley, Brad, and ask the author of this book about it:

http://www.amazon.com/Way-Shambhala-Mythical-Kingdom-Himalayas/dp/1570628742/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231340041&sr=1-6

[Doctor Jay]

Furthermore, Europeans probably wanted sugar in their tea because the Chinese sold them the crappy old tea that had turned black and kept the good green tea to themselves.

Would you put sugar in green tea?

Tom Standage, _History of the world in 6 glasses_

[caoshiren]

As a Chinese, I can tell you the Chinese word of Shangri-La is sound translation from the English word. Shangri-La indeed was invented out of nowhere by James Hilton.

[Alon Levy]

Chinese characters are all one syllable. Chinese words may be composed of multiple characters. Mandarin has a large and increasing number of such words, because it's full of homonyms, and because of foreign borrowings and neologisms. Other Chinese languages, such as Cantonese and Hokkien, have fewer homonyms, and hence fewer polysyllabic words. Classical Chinese had few homonyms; the issue is that Mandarin vastly simplified the classical syllable structure, so that it has fewer tones and permits fewer final consonants than any other Chinese language.

I don't think Shangri-La has anything to do with Shan. Wikipedia suggests that Shang is a proper name of a mountain pass, or that Shangri-La is a corruption of Tibetan Shambhala. Either way, it's not completely made up, and the story's based on Tibetan legends.

[Wei-Kang Wong]

It is true that chinese tea is served without sugar. But I don't think it is true that tea is served at lower temperature in general. The more accurate answer is that it depends on what kind of chinese tea you are talking about (broadly speaking there are six types, with many different varieties within each type). If it is green tea or teas with little fermentation (say Long Jing produced near shanghai), then yes it is served at lower temperature because boiling water will damage the delicate taste of the delicate leaves (the more expensive green tea tends to be more delicate because it is made with leaves at the very tip). The same is true for Japanese tea because it is also unfermented. But more partially fermented tea like Oolong or the "Iron Buddha", it is served hot as well. If you use lukewarm water, you will not be able to bring out the full flavor of the tea at all. Same for fully fermented tea (black tea) and tea that went through post fermentation (like Pu-er), these are made with boiling water as well.

Also tea that went through post fermentation, like pu-er, can get better with time if it is stored well. But green tea is better consumed as soon as possible. The passage of time only deteriorates the taste.

As for the lack of tea cup handle, I think the reason is that you won't have a spare hand for the tea cup handle. The reason is that what happens is that because good chinese tea is made with loose tea leaves (not in tea bag and also no tea bags in old times), you put the loose tea leaves into the cup itself and pour in hot water. Then to drink the tea, you hold the saucer with your left hand to bring the three pieces of the set to your mouth, you will then use your right hand to maneuver the tea cover to push the loose tea leaves away from your mouth as you drink the tea. So to operate this three-piece tea set, both your hands are already tied up. Even if there is a handle, only an economist with an invisible hand will have the spare hand to operate it! But invisible hand needs an invisible tea cup handle :-)

Wei-Kang

[JJ]

Trivia you maybe didn't ask for. A friend of mine's wife is Tibetan, and when the main characters visit Shagri-la in the movie *Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,* she said the actors are speaking real Tibetan, but are constantly cracking jokes, saying things like "My nipples are cold."

[Wei-Kang Wong]

I forgot to say: for green teas that are little fermented, they are typically made in white porcelain (like the three-piece tea set you were referring to) or glasses because this allows one to appreciate the color of the tea and the tea leaves dancing in the water (which is part of tea appreciation).

But for fermented tea requiring boiling water, the preferred way to make the tea is not with porcelain or glasses, but using tea pots made from purple clay produced from a place in China called Yixing as they will bring out the full flavor of the tea (one should never scrub the interior of these tea pots because the pores of these purple-clayed tea pots retains the fragrance of the tea made in all previous rounds and makes subsequent ones taste better - some sort of cumulative effect.

So therefore it is perhaps correct to say that teas served in the three-piece tea set are typically served not very hot as they are typically used to make teas with little fermentation (using water of lower temperature).

[mc]

I've been working on my Chinese lately, & I happened to be looking through a Mandarin dictionary when I saw this thread. No luck on 'Shangri-la,' though.

Slightly off-topic:

I'll be heading to Beijing on Friday with my family. We're adopting our second Chinese daughter. It's been a long, stressful wait--but it'll be worth every minute when we welcome that little girl into our family.

I didn't invest with Madoff, but I think I can safely say this is a much more satisfying way to go broke!

Best to all.

[cc]

The cover is not to keep the tea warm, which it most certainly fails to do, but to keep out unwanted debris and insects, since a covered tea cup (or mug) is out for quite some time.

[Julian Elson]

I guess the issue with teacup handles is one of durability vs. ease of use. Handles make it easier to pick up a hot cup, but they also create a distinctive structural weakpoint.

One hypothetical possibility -- tea-drinking originated very early in China, when manufacturing techniques were primitive enough that handled cups would have had an unacceptably high breakage rate for regular use (and been costly to replace). Later on, of course, Chinese manufacturing became more sophisticated and could have used handled cups, but by that point they were accustomed to drinking hot tea out of unhandled cups. In Europe, by contrast, tea was adopted much later, by which point manufacturing techniques were already sophisticated enough for regular usage of handled cups. So, with no custom of enduring hot teacups on their hands, they invented teacup handles once they started drinking hot tea. Effectively, it was a late mover advantage on the part of the Europeans.

I don't know how plausible that is, but it's the best I can come up with right now.

[Thorstein Veblen]

yep, it's the xiang1 ge2 li3 la1 that other commenters have mentioned. Incidentally, it's now the name of what used to be called Zhongdian, in the Tibetan area of Yunnan... The local gov't changed the name to attract more tourists... Tacky, but Zhongdian is a legitimate tourist site...

[Diana]

thanks for all the detail here about Asian tea. I always wondered which teapots or teacups were "real" chinese tea service... now I know.

My own bit of trivia: in Kyoto they sell a certain type of beautifully-glazed tea bowls ("kiyo mizu dera" ware) to the tourists, and since these are just trinkets they also sell "western" style teacups with handles in addition to the traditional bowls.
Althouh the glazes and colors are unique and beautiful, I've never seen this kind of pottery available anywhere except Kyoto. Which means, once you break one, it can't be replaced unless you're heading back to Japan.

does anyone here know of anyplace in America which sells "kiyo mizu dera" pottery?

[Eric Blood Axe]

As to the invention of tea drinking, you can read Kai-lung's account.

[Noni Mausa]

What a lovely conversation, the essence of civility.

I guess I had assumed that the tea cups had no handles due to what I perceive as an Asian preference for tidy, easily stored objects, whether beds, dishes, folding furniture or even art. I could be wrong about this, of course.

But for contrast, when I visited Spain circa 1970, I was struck by all the huge ostentations furniture in the hotels and public buildings we visited -- many of these pieces would not have fit into any modern home, much less fit through the door. They were ostensibly "buffets'. "bureaus", "sideboards" and such, but were as big as Buicks.

What I have seen of eastern furnishings is much more spare. My early exposure to things oriental was by way of relatives working in Japan; I suppose China is different.

Enviously yours,

Noni

[astrid]

Europeans tend to drink tea to accompany food, so they drank out of larger cups where a handle makes more sense. Traditional Chinese teacups are too small for handles.

Shan-gri-la is a fictionalization of Shambala. It's meaningless in Tibetan but it's a pretty plausible fake word. La means mountain pass and many actual Tibetan mountain passes have similar looking English translations.

The Chinese translation of Shangri-la does look nice. (Chinese literal translations are often very evocative for the Chinese - America, known as mei guo, literally beautiful country.) As for its meaning, few Mainland Chinese are familiar with Lost Horizon. They tend to think of it as a combination something Tibetan (perhaps what they see in Zhongdian or Jiuzhaigou) and the long standing Chinese notion of tao yuan, literally peach origin.

[Nathan Myers]

The creator of the Shangri-la Diet, Seth Roberts, formerly of the Cal psychology department, happens to live in China now, and teaches at Tsinghua University.

[Doctor Science]

What I have never understood are the Russian tea glasses + holders. My experience is that the tea glasses are too hot to sip from until they are suddenly too cold, while the pretty metal glass-holders conduct heat very nicely into one's fingers.

[La Deluge]

High marks to Gerhard for using wandle so deftly.

[Ken Houghton]

After reading this thread, I keep thinking that James Hilton is to blame for a Three Dog Night song.

Need some tea, to be drunk with two hands in the manner of that well-known Oriental Edward James Olmos in _Bladerunner_.

[MattYoung]

Another theory is that the federal aggegation over the North Amrica is out of date, manifest destiny is no more.

Under this theory, it is the federal government and national finance which must deaggregate. It is the standard problem, the aggregate measurement of the natinal economy is way off the mark because the regional parts of the USA have diverged. No longer is the national accounts in any way a direct sum of the domponents, many gaps exits in the aggregate accounts, and as long as we enforce aggregate national accounts will eill be further off equilibrium and significant hedge funds are needed to fill in the nation gaps.

If his theory is correct, then foreign trade which relies on an accurate aggregate measure of American productivity is way off base.

In this theory, the prediction is a general abandonment of the dollar as the national currency is replaced by possibly the Euro or Asian monetary systems.

If this happens, then the contraction we have now will be much worse when Keynesians finish creating more dis-equilibria. We end up with a geeral revolt, or a complete adoption of digital money which bypasses Krugman and his gang.

[Kaleberg]

What is so odd? Wasn't California named for a fictional country in some 16th century adventure fiction?