Drepung Monastery

The Largest Of The Three Great Gelug Monasteries Of Lhasa; Major Historical And Cultural Site Protected At The National Level · Lhasa, Tibet

Once the largest monastery in the world, spread like a white city across a hillside west of Lhasa, and the most powerful of the three great Gelug monasteries of Tibet. Founded in 1416 by a disciple of Tsongkhapa, it grew into a monastic university of colleges, chapels and printing houses that at its height housed close to ten thousand monks; its name means rice heap, for the way its whitewashed buildings pile up the slope. Within it stands the Ganden Palace, the residence of the Dalai Lamas from the second to the fifth, and effectively the seat of Tibetan government until the Great Fifth moved to the newly built Potala in the seventeenth century. Visitors climb stone alleys between the colleges to the vast Coqen assembly hall, hung with thangkas and butter lamps and crowded with pilgrims shuffling past golden statues, and can look down over the Lhasa valley from the roofs. Each year the Shoton Festival opens at dawn on the hillside here, when an enormous embroidered thangka of the Buddha is unrolled down the mountainside before thousands of onlookers. Foreign visitors need a Tibet Travel Permit and must come on a guided tour.

Drepung Monastery, Gengpei Utse hillside, Chengguan District, Lhasa, Tibet, China

Daily, roughly 9:00-16:00, with chapels sometimes closing earlier in the afternoon (check). Foreign visitors need a permit and a guided tour.

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