Drepung Monastery

Drepung does not present as a building but as a hill town: white blocks stacked up the lower slopes of Mount Gephel, five kilometres of chapels, colleges, kitchens and residential courts, joined by lanes and stairways. The name means rice heap, and from the valley road that is exactly what it looks like.

The scale

Founded in 1416 by Jamyang Choje Tashi Palden, a disciple of Tsongkhapa, Drepung became the largest and most powerful of the three great Gelug monasteries of the Lhasa valley — at its height housing many thousands of monks across four separate colleges, with its own estates, granaries and political weight. The Ganden Palace within the complex was the residence of the early Dalai Lamas before the Potala was built, which makes this the seat from which the Fifth moved down the valley.

The twentieth century emptied most of it. What functions today is a fraction of the original establishment, but it is a working monastery again, and the scale of what stands is still hard to take in on one visit.

What to see

The Coqen (assembly) Hall is the centrepiece — a forest of pillars, hung with thangkas, opening onto chapels of gilded images. Above it the colleges climb in terraces, and the walk up between them, past kitchens where tea is still made in cauldrons the size of small rooms, is as much the experience as any single chapel.

Shoton begins here

At dawn on the first day of Shoton, an enormous appliquéd thangka is carried out and unfurled down the hillside above the monastery, and the crowd that gathers in the dark to see it is one of the great sights of the Tibetan year. The festival then moves down to Norbulingka for the opera. If you are in Lhasa for it, this is the morning to lose sleep over.

Pair Drepung with Sera — the two sit on opposite sides of the city and the standard Lhasa itinerary does one in the morning and one in the afternoon.