LAURENCE BRAHM spent the summers of 2002 and 2003 hitchhiking across three provinces in China, from Tibet to Qinghai and Yunnan. The 42-year-old lawyer and former consultant wasn't trying to find himself, but rather answer the question: where is Shangri-La?
'I had witnessed the country going from being unmaterialistic to being completely consumed by materialism in a short time,' says Brahm, an American who has been living and working in China since 1981, and started a multimedia company called Red Capital in 1999. 'There's a search going on now among people who are lost. They are rushing to Yunnan or going backpacking in Tibet. I saw the same movement we had in the US in the 60s, where people were rebelling from institutional paths and doing things that were alternative.'
Brahm decided to document that quest, following the counter-culturists with a film crew. He found many grass-roots efforts to preserve local lifestyles and cultures. The results are: a 90-minute documentary film in English; a coffee-table book and a paperback (both published by Higher Education Press, in English and Chinese); a 52-episode television programme that will air in China from July; and two music CDs. The whole project is called Searching for Shangri-La, and its subtext is the idea that China's alternative movement may swell as a new generation scrutinises the country's values.
An ethnic Mongolian composer, San Bao, joined Brahm on the journey to record indigenous sounds such as Tibetan chants, Yunnan drums and yak bells for the CDs (also published by Higher Education Press), which he later mixed with modern electronic sounds to create a New Age fusion.
Brahm believes his is one of the first multimedia projects to be executed on the mainland. 'China is in the middle of a media transition, so it's more open to alternative ideas than some of the western stations that are driven by an economic model. It isn't stuck into fixed models,' says Brahm, who writes a weekly column for the South China Morning Post on economics and politics. A downside to this is the fragmentation of China's media, which meant Brahm couldn't approach just one company to produce and distribute all of his formats - he had to talk to each of the 31 TV stations involved individually.
The project's title is based on a competition among several Chinese provinces in 2002 to be officially renamed Shangri-La by the central government. 'In that case, the debate was driven by materialistic tourism potential rather than by a discussion of what the real Shangri-La is,' says Brahm, who is based in Beijing and is fluent in Putonghua.