Labrang Monastery: The Great Gelug Seat of Amdo
In the valley of the Sangchu river, known in Chinese as the Daxia, at an altitude of about 2,900 metres in the southwest of Gansu Province, stands one of the most consequential monasteries in the Tibetan Buddhist world. Labrang Monastery was founded in 1709 by the first Jamyang Zhepa, Ngawang Tsöndrü, a scholar of formidable reputation who had studied and taught in Lhasa before returning to his native Amdo. Within a few generations his foundation had grown into a walled monastic town of temples, colleges, residences and printing houses, counted among the six great monasteries of the Gelug school alongside Ganden, Drepung, Sera, Tashilhunpo and Kumbum.
The residence of the Jamyang Zhepa
The name Labrang comes from the Tibetan word for the residence of a high lama, and the monastery has always been inseparable from the lineage of its founder. The first Jamyang Zhepa was invited back to Amdo by a Khoshut Mongol prince whose patronage supplied the land and resources for the new foundation. That alliance between an eminent scholar and a powerful noble patron followed a pattern familiar across Tibetan history, but at Labrang it produced something unusually durable. Each successive Jamyang Zhepa incarnation inherited not only spiritual authority but the stewardship of a growing estate that came to dominate the religious, economic and political life of a wide stretch of the Amdo grasslands. Nomad communities sent their sons to be ordained, herds and trade goods flowed toward the Sangchu valley, and the monastery in turn provided education, ritual services, arbitration and a shared point of identity for Tibetan, Mongol and Hui communities living along the edge of the plateau.
A monastic university on the edge of the plateau
What made Labrang famous far beyond Gansu was its curriculum. The monastery developed six colleges, or dratsang, each with its own halls, teachers and course of study. The largest is the philosophy college, where monks work through the classic Gelug program of logic, epistemology, Madhyamaka philosophy, monastic discipline and the Perfection of Wisdom literature, a course that traditionally takes well over a decade and culminates in the geshe degree. Alongside it stand colleges devoted to the two branches of tantric study, to the Kalachakra system with its associated astronomy and calendrical science, to traditional Tibetan medicine, and to the practice tradition of the deity Hevajra. This breadth turned Labrang into a genuine university town. At its height the monastery housed several thousand monks, drawing students not only from Amdo but from Mongolia and far beyond. Visitors in the courtyards today can still watch the daily debate sessions, with their theatrical clap of hands as one monk drives a philosophical point at his seated opponent.
Halls, temples and a famous printing house
Architecturally, Labrang is a dense weave of whitewashed monk dwellings pressed around monumental assembly halls and temples roofed in gilded bronze. The Grand Sutra Hall, the ceremonial heart of the complex where the full assembly gathers for chanting, was badly damaged by a fire in 1985 and subsequently rebuilt; its interior once again glows with butter lamps, silk banners and long rows of cushioned benches. Around it cluster temple buildings dedicated to Maitreya, the future Buddha, and to the protector deities, along with stupas, chapels and the residences of the monastery's incarnate lamas. One institution deserves special mention: the Barkhang, Labrang's traditional printing house. For centuries monks here have printed scriptures from hand-carved wooden blocks, and the workshop preserves an enormous store of these blocks covering canonical texts, philosophical treatises and liturgies. Watching a printer ink a block, lay a strip of paper across it and pull a clean page in a matter of seconds is one of the quiet marvels of a visit.
The kora: walking the wheel of prayer
For the lay pilgrims who stream into the valley, the heart of Labrang is not a lecture hall but a path. The kora, the clockwise circumambulation route around the entire monastic complex, runs for roughly three kilometres and is lined for long stretches with covered galleries of prayer wheels, well over a thousand of them by most counts. From before dawn, pilgrims move along the circuit spinning each wheel in turn, murmuring mantras, fingering rosaries, some advancing by full-body prostrations that measure the route one body length at a time. Elderly nomads in sheepskin coats walk beside students and townspeople, and the soft continuous rattle of turning wheels becomes the soundtrack of the whole valley. The kora also offers the best introduction for outside visitors, since it traces the monastery's perimeter, passes chapels and stupas, and climbs to viewpoints where the whole golden-roofed complex spreads out below against bare hillsides.
Monlam: the great prayer festival
The high point of Labrang's ritual year comes in the first weeks after the Tibetan New Year, when the monastery celebrates the Monlam, or Great Prayer Festival. Tens of thousands of pilgrims from across the grasslands converge on the valley for days of ceremonies. The most famous moment is the unveiling of a gigantic appliqué thangka, an embroidered image of a Buddha so large that ranks of monks must carry it rolled on their shoulders in procession before it is unfurled down a stone terrace on the hillside facing the monastery. Crowds surge forward to touch the fabric and receive its blessing. Other days bring masked cham dances performed in the great courtyard, the display of intricate sculptures modelled from coloured butter, and processions in which sacred images are carried around the monastery grounds. For anyone wanting to understand what a living monastery means to its surrounding society, Monlam at Labrang is as vivid a demonstration as exists anywhere.
A turbulent twentieth century
Labrang's location on the frontier between Tibetan, Mongol, Chinese and Hui Muslim spheres brought prosperity in good times and exposure in bad ones. The early twentieth century saw the monastery caught up in violent regional conflicts with Muslim warlord armies based in Gansu and Qinghai, episodes still remembered with grief in Amdo. After 1949 the monastery's estates were dismantled, and during the Cultural Revolution religious life was suppressed outright: monks were expelled, and parts of the complex were destroyed or turned to secular use. Reopening came in 1980, and the decades since have brought extensive rebuilding, the return of monastic education and the revival of the great festivals. The community today numbers well over a thousand monks. Modern Xiahe town has grown along the road outside the monastery walls, with a lively strip of shops, pilgrim hostels and restaurants, so that the visitor now experiences monastery and market town as a single continuous organism, much as pilgrims always have.
Visiting Xiahe today
The monastery lies on the edge of Xiahe, the seat of a county within Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu Province. Most travellers arrive by road from Lanzhou, the provincial capital, descending into the Sangchu valley after hours of switchbacks through loess hills and high pasture. The altitude of about 2,900 metres is enough to leave lowlanders short of breath on the first day, so it pays to walk the kora slowly. Guided tours of the interior halls leave from the main gate and are the only way into most temples, while the circumambulation path, the hillside viewpoints and the atmosphere of the pilgrim street are freely open at all hours. Mornings bring the best light on the gilded roofs and the densest flow of pilgrims; winter visits during Monlam are cold but unforgettable.
Explore on the map
Labrang is one node, though a mighty one, in a web of Gelug foundations stretching from Lhasa across the whole of the Tibetan cultural world. On our interactive map you can see exactly where the monastery sits in the Sangchu valley, trace the route from Lanzhou through the hills of southern Gansu, and discover the other great monastic cities of the plateau and beyond. Zoom out and the pattern of Buddhist Asia opens up; zoom in and the next journey begins to sketch itself.