What the first American tourist in ‘Shangri-La’ took home

More than a century ago, a Tibetan despot’s embrace of a stranger inspired an enduring myth.

Saddle with stirrup leathers and stirrups. Silk seat with cotton backing. Leather tail ornaments.
This decorative saddle was among the gifts given to botanist and National Geographic Explorer Joseph Rock when he visited Muli—a place he described as a “fairyland of the mountains”—in the 1920s.
Mark Thiessen, NGM staff
ByBrian Kevin
Published February 26, 2026

Tibetan saddles can be high art, covered with ornate metalwork and inlaid jewels. This one, given to National Geographic Explorer Joseph Rock about a century ago by a lama warlord named Xiang Cicheng Zhaba, is on the humbler side. But it was no less a treasure to Rock, an ethnographer and botanist with a taste for finery. In 1924, he became the first American to visit Muli, Xiang’s isolated mountain kingdom. Xiang was a despotic ruler with a dungeon full of peasants, but he plied his visitor with tributes, among them a golden bowl and a leopard skin. Rock, perhaps not above flattery, praised Muli's bucolic splendor. In doing so, he likely inspired the fictional setting of the 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which captured Western imaginations with its depiction of a Tibetan utopia called Shangri-La.

See this object and more at the National Geographic Museum of Exploration starting summer 2026. Visit moe.nationalgeographic.org.

A version of this story appears in the March 2026 issue of National Geographic magazine.