Jim Bennett speaks of Shangri-La and Dogpatch:
However, we view Tibet fundamentally from Indian eyes, a legacy of the fact that our first knowledge of it comes from British Imperial sources, going back to Younghusband’s expedition and before. The British saw it as the Indians had, as a mysterious and saintly land of mystics, whose writing and religion were derived from Indian sources, hidden behind the Himalayas, and reachable only through an extraordinarily arduous journey through the world’s most impressive mountains.The Chinese, however, saw it as the even poorer land behind the poorest provinces of Han China proper, reachable through a difficult but not extraordinary journey in which things just got a little poorer, a little dirtier, and a little less properly Chinese day by day. They saw Tibet basically as inhabited by poorer and more ignorant cousins, with bizarre and rather unsavory religious practices, sort of the way we view backcountry snake-handling fundamentalists.
In short, for Indians, and by extension the Anglosphere, Tibet was Shangri-La; to the Chinese, it was Dogpatch. The Chinese tend to view the Western fascination with Tibetan religion and the Daili Lama the way we would view some backwoods snake-handling preacher who inexplicably was heralded as a deeply wise and holy man in some other part of the world. It’s so inexplicable to them that the whole business seems like some transparently ridiculous anti-Chinese plot dreamed up by the encircling imperialists.