The Culture Column
The Hidden City
Of course, there is the question of how Shangri-La remains hidden in the world, in this era of satellite photography and Google Earth. It isn't necessarily hidden to absolutely everyone in the world, however, and there are probably officials in every government of note who are aware of it. Why they do not do anything about Shangri-La is up for personal choice, ranging from a trading of favors to some degree of truth or another to the rumors that the Powers have nuclear bombs stashed away in such places as Washington D.C, London, and Moscow, and use these to force aware governments of the world to keep the lid shut.
Regardless of the manner in which the governments of the world are kept from interfering with the business in Shangri-La, from there it is easy to keep things quiet. Google Earth, for example, has respected requests to blur certain areas in our own world, and it is not out of the question that certain areas are in fact absent entirely, replaced with false representations of the area.
Shangri-La may not be hidden anymore, either. It has possibly secured status as an independent state, similar to Singapore, Vatican City, or Monaco. It may have given China an incentive to defend it, and Shangri-La likely does everything it can to prevent outside authorities from having firm evidence that there is any wrongdoing, and in those rare cases that the Powers fail in this endeavor, it is of course an isolated incident, and the majority of Shangri-La has no connections to criminal activities of any kind. Dewey, Noir, & Howe is probably even further entrenched as a Power in the city, being one of several groups whose duty it is to ensure that everything which comes into Shangri-La appears to have a legitimate reason for entering it.
Food
Shangri-La has a population of about fifty thousand people, and all of them have to eat. All of the Powers are involved to one degree or another in importing food, and even most other organizations at least import most of the food which their members consume. Employers in Shangri-La, you see, are generally responsible for feeding and housing their workers, whether that employer daily receives news on his Mafia operations in New York City, or daily receives news on the sales that day in his grocery store. It's factored into the employee's wages, of course, but it isn't good form for an employer with ties to the outside world, or to food, to not make sure that their workers are provided with food. Other employers, without direct access to food, generally pay a little bit more, for the inconvenience.
Tibetan culture has ingrained itself better in other places than clothing. The two most common drinks in Shangri-La are raksi and butter tea. The former is an alcohol made from rice, millet, or mulberries, and is a strong, clear drink with a taste reminiscent of sake (which itself is enjoyed by Settlers, who have a knack for passing on the habit of drinking sake- without any of the accompanying rituals- to other Settlers before dying off). Butter tea, on the other hand, is a tangy drink made from butter (often but not always yak butter) and salt mixed in with tea. Citizens drink it even more than Coca-Cola (popular among those who can afford it) and water combined. They drink it when they wake up, they drink it with breakfast, they drink it before they set off to work, they drink it during smoking breaks and during lunch and during post-lunch smoking breaks, and they drink it after work is over but before they've gone home, and they drink it with dinner and later on in the evening and then again before they go to bed, and to tell the truth they don't drink it as much as other Tibetans.
Yoghurts, cheeses, and butters are all common foods, and a cheese called chura kampo is an especially popular food, which takes on a form like a candy bar and is eaten in the same manner and just as much. It's not uncommon to see a few people sitting on a bench somewhere, watching people pass by on foot and on bicycle, and just eating a few bars of chura kampo (and possibly drinking some butter tea from a thermos).
Dough made of barley flour is by far the most common, and any restaurant or store can be counted on to have at least a few styles of dumpling or roll of its own, with this or that ingredient added to this or that degree. Stews of mutton or yak, with spices, mustard, and potatoes, are common for dinner. Britain has also contributed here and there, often in its breads, but also from staples like fish and chips to foods like rhubarb and sugar beets. Curiously, curry didn't find its way into Shangri-La until it came by way of Britain.
Roasted barley flour can be mixed with butter tea, and both are typically offered to guests (who are advised to drink the butter tea slowly, since it will usually be refilled immediately after it is emptied). Fried biscuits and bags of mustard seed are also common.
Along with the temperature of the body and the environment, much medical emphasis is put on diet and the digestion.
Art and Music
Eight symbols are important and oft-used in Shangri-La: the right-turning white conch shell, the endless knot, the golden fish pair, the lotus flower, the precious parasol, the wheel of law, and the victory banner. They are used in artwork again and again, and even referenced in place names, and they are traditionally taken as personal symbols of one Power or another. The Devil Doctor, for instance, is represented by the endless knot and is occasionally referred to as the Endless Knot. The Doctors Mabuse have long been represented by the victory banner, and Dewey, Noir, & Howe is represented by the conch shell. There is not a Power for every one of the eight symbols, but this is because Powers come and go as they have the strength to be considered Powers, but there has never been more than eight Powers at a time so far as anyone knows, and it is considered a bad idea to declare oneself to be a Power when there are already eight.
Most paintings are done on canvasses of silk, and most of them are portraits. The individual represented is usually located in the center of the portrait, surrounded with abstract designs symbolizing events in their life, characteristics of theirs, and other important qualities relating to them.
Street songs are a common sound in the street, accompanied by dramyins (a seven-stringed lute) and usually relating to current events. Newspapers are the province of those who do not go to work each morning, while everyone else catches the news as they hear it sung (street singers, by necessity, compose catchy tunes very quickly). Another popular instrument is the jahling, a sort of double reed woodwind.
Every few months, someone or another commissions the creation of a sand mandala, a horribly intricate design made from colored sand. It can take weeks for a trained team to produce a sand mandala, and this is without taking into account that each design is made from scratch. When finished, the sand mandala is sealed into glass, plastic, or some other material in order to make it permanent, and then usually set into some piece of the local architecture.
Literature is a highly-prized pastime in Shangri-La, and everyone, absolutely everyone, is an author. Few are published, but that isn't the point. You just simply can't expect other people to respect you if, by the time that you are living on your own, you do not have at least a few short stories which you have written. It's expected that, if you have guests, you will let them peruse a few of your better stories while they partake of the tea and the roasted bread, and Shangri-La is a roiling mass of literary evolution, with a hundred new techniques beings tried out every day. Most of them are utter trash, and would never have been tried anywhere else, but Shangri-La is a place where only figuring out some unique trick is liable to set you apart from everyone else.
Infrastructure
In 1952, the city Shangri-La held its breath, and someone flipped a switch (metaphoricallyó it was, probably, actually more complicated than that) and the Bomb Plant, as it was called, turned on, and for the first time in its history, the whole city would have access to electricity.
Shangri-La has always had access to coal, but it hasn't been the least expensive of commodities. Typically, if you had it, you used it for more pressing concerns than producing electricity, and it was generally the areas populated by people important to the Powers who would have electricity. Shangri-La didn't notice much, anyways. There had been people living there since long before electricity, and if the Businessmen and the Settlers sometimes complainedÖ That was life, in Shangri-La.
But there it was, and electricity was nearly as cheap as dirt in Shangri-La, and it still is. There are a few rumors that the Devil Doctor has a nuclear bomb resting beneath the city, made with stolen material destined for the Bomb Plant, but he's probably the best person to have a bomb under the city; he's obsessed with it, and it's questionable whether his sanity would survive if he blew up the city. He hasn't been outside of Shangri-La for more than a century.
Essentials such as water are taken care of by private groups, not by any sort of governmental agency (after all, there is no official government in Shangri-La) but the Powers are generally their employers, just as with the Keepers of the Gentlemen's Agreement, and they cooperate with each other in order to make sure that nobody is leaving anything important overlooked. It is the Mabuse Family, for example, which manages most of the water supplies of the city, while Dewey, Noir, & Howe imports much of Shangri-La's grains through its subsidiary, European Health Logistics.
Crime and Currency
Guns are not allowed, much to the great sorrow of Arpent Noir, famed gun enthusiast, who by the time that he moved to Shangri-La had more guns than the average reader of this column has dollars. They've been judged to be far too much trouble, and far too inviting of danger, and they have hit upon a very effective means of gun control: anyone who carries a gun in Shangri-La, or tries to bring one in, is executed on the grounds of breaking the Gentlemen's Agreement, which was modified in the 1830s in order to add this penalty.
Forms of assault, ranging from battery to rape to murder, are all punishable under the Gentlemen's Agreement, typically with a fine. All forms of currency are accepted in Shangri-La, for any purpose whether for paying a fine or paying for a purchase, so long as an equivalent to the pound sterling (which has been the dominant form since 1843) is known, and Dewey, Noir, & Howe track down the current exchange rate of even the Zambian kwacha and issue, in exchange for the currency and a small extra fee, a currency which is accepted through the entire city as being equal in value to the pound sterling.
A Profile of the Average Citizen of Shangri-La
The average citizen is not a criminal. She works in a restaurant, or she is a trash collector, or she works in a grocery store. As part of her paycheck each week, her employer probably gives her a week's worth of food. Otherwise, she simply receives more cash than if she were performing equivalent work for someone who did provide food, and it is always cash, no matter what. Checks are rare in Shangri-La. She doesn't bother with housing payments, because part of what she would earn in any other part of the world goes straight to whoever owns her place of residence. It is entirely possible that everyone in her apartment block works for the same person, or at least the same organization.
She drinks enough butter tea that it is possible that her blood could not be drunk by a vampire. When she gets home, she probably takes twenty or thirty minutes to take out the latest story she is working on, and add to it. Or she may go through her notebook of ideas, developing other stories or considering how to best use the latest idea which she came up with, and whether it's been done before.
Perhaps she will go with her friends this week to the cinema, and she will hope that that in-theater narrator she prefers to listen to will be working that day. What the movie is, exactly, is of course less important than who happens to be providing the commentary for it. But at any rate, it's all up in the air. She'll walk or bike there, though, since the streets are narrow and cars are uncommon (the few powered vehicles are generally motorcycles).
She knows that the city in which she lives does not get along very well with the world, but this is something which she merely knows and doesn't pay much mind. It's a distant thing. She wears the concentric tattoos of the Gentlemen's Agreement on her left shoulder, but has also placed it over her right eye, because the design just looks so amazing like that. She lives in a city run by criminals but she feels safe enough to walk down even the meanest alleyway, which would be considered only mildly gruff in New York City, at least if you're an adherent to the Gentlemen's Agreement.
She may also have multiple husbands (Tibetan-style polyandry never died until it mutated into a more general habit of having multiple husbands when one was not sane enough to realize that one spouse was plenty frustrating enough).
Next Month: I've had a few ideas for cultures for more traditional fantasy species like elves and dragons. So you get dwarves next week, along with maggot-gods, intoxication lounges, and brother-bands.
