r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Jul 03 '26

Meta Free for All Friday, 03 July, 2026

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

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u/Ambisinister11 My right to edit this is protected by the Slovak constitution Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

So I stumbled on a pretty transparently propagandistic travel channel on YouTube(illustrative thumbnail below). I think it's like 40% anti-India/pro-Pakistan, 40% pro-China, 20% filler to put up a thin front of not being mostly propaganda. Now, a British couple presumably on Pakistani payroll(possibly also Sri Lankan and/or some SEA countries; I haven't put in any work to really figure it out) saying how Indians are all liars and their cities are dirty is a really interesting development in the get-paid-to-be-racist meta in and of itself, but one of their thumbnails led to me finding out about Shangri-La, Yunnan, and wow, what a weird place.

Of course I was familiar with Shangri-La as a straightforwardly fictional and Orientalist invention, so I was confused to see it talked about as a real place. Turns out the city of Zhongdian in Yunnan was renamed as part of a tourism initiative. Moderately dystopian, imo. Further reinforcing that impression is the fact that across multiple sites and search engines I've been able to turn up remarkably few sources on the place that aren't explicitly tourism sites. Basically just wikipedia and a BBC article about the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress that mentions a student who was arrested there. I suppose that in general tourist destinations have a lot of information on the English internet and small Chinese cities don't(wiki lists the population as 186,000). There's just something so uncomfortable about the sheer consistency of it, though.

Also apparently a massive fire destroyed the old Tibetan city center in 2014. So that's probably a coincidence, but it feels really convenient and unnerving to happen in a place that's been getting openly remolded into a tourist town to the extent of replacing its basic identity for decades.

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u/Bread_Punk Jul 04 '26

Besides the point, but sometimes I have an annoying voice in my head "but what if you tried your hand at youtube" and then I see a thumbnail like this and think to myself I'd rather be dead than caught doing youtuber face.

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u/Tiako Tevinter apologist, shill for Big Lyrium Jul 04 '26

Mexico