Jokhang Temple

If the Potala is the image of Tibet, the Jokhang is its centre of gravity. It is a low, dark, butter-lamp-smoked complex in the middle of the old city, architecturally modest next to the palace on the hill, and it is the holiest building in the Tibetan Buddhist world. Pilgrims measure distance from here.

The Jowo

The temple exists for one statue. The Jowo Shakyamuni — a seated image of the Buddha at the age of twelve — is held to have been brought to Tibet in the 7th century by Princess Wencheng of the Tang court, as part of her marriage to the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo. It is the single most venerated object in Tibet. The queue to stand in front of it for a few seconds forms before dawn, and for many Tibetans reaching it is the point of a journey made once in a lifetime.

Songtsen Gampo's other principal queen, Bhrikuti of Nepal, is credited in the same tradition with the temple's founding — one of the oldest of the many threads that tie Lhasa to the Kathmandu Valley.

Barkhor: the circuit, not the market

The Barkhor is the kora — the clockwise devotional circuit — that loops the Jokhang, and it is the thing to understand about this place. It is not a street with a temple on it; it is a ritual path that the city grew around. From early morning the flow is continuous: pilgrims with prayer wheels, families, monks, people prostrating the full length of it a body at a time. Shops line the outside of it and it is genuinely a market too, but the market is the accretion, not the substance.

Walk it clockwise, at least once, before going inside. It costs nothing, it takes twenty minutes, and it explains the temple better than the temple does.

The roof

The upper terrace is the one place where the three things sit in a single view: the golden roofs of the Jokhang in the foreground, the Barkhor crowd below, and the Potala across the rooftops. It is the photograph everyone comes for, and unusually, it deserves the reputation.