If you are referring
specifically to
Shangri-La, that is an ancient Buddhist paradise in the Himalayan mountains.
The middle east is a powder cage of distinct ethnic divisions that also has strategic value: mineral resources, it's close to the Indian subcontinent, it borders Russia at the Caucuses, the trade routes of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal...
Afghanistan- As long as the country is poor and communities isolated from each other, the government will be unable to control the entire country. The last time Afghanistan was stable was under their last king, Zahir Shah.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, pharmaceutical firms began investigating ergot, finding that it contained valuable medicinal compounds such as ergotamine, used to treat migraines. A Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffman became especially interested in this field, and in November 1938, in the week following Kristallnacht and the run-up to World War II, he first created a derivative of ergot that would later be dubbed lysergic acid diethalyamide: LSD.
Roman doctors described a disease called the sacred fire (sacer ignis) which by the Middle Ages came to be known as St. Anthony’s Fire: “an ulcerous Eruption, reddish, or mix’d of pale and red: and painful to the Patient,” as one 1714 text put it.
origins.osu.edu