Palcho Monastery & Kumbum

Palcho sits in a walled compound at the top of Gyantse, under the crag with the dzong on it, and it holds the most unusual building in Tibet. It is also, unusually, a compound shared between schools — Sakya, Gelug and the Buton tradition held colleges here side by side, which is why the iconography inside is so much broader than a single-school monastery's.

The Kumbum

The Kumbum — hundred thousand images — is a stupa in outline and a building in practice: nine tiers stepping inward to a golden dome and a pair of painted eyes, and inside, arranged around each level, some seventy-odd chapels holding statuary and wall paintings.

You climb it from within, on tight dark stairways, and the effect is cumulative: each chapel is a small lit box of 15th-century murals — mandalas, protectors, lineage portraits — and you meet them one at a time, dozens of them, until the sequence stops being individual rooms and becomes a single argument about the structure of the cosmos, which is exactly what it was built to be. The paintings are widely held to be the finest surviving body of Gyantse-school work anywhere, and much of it is original rather than restored.

Bring a torch. Half the chapels have no light beyond what comes through the door.

The rest of the compound

The assembly hall beside it is worth the time for its own murals and a fine three-dimensional mandala. Above the compound, the walls of the old defensive circuit climb the ridge to the Gyantse Dzong, and the walk up gives the view that puts the whole thing in order: the Kumbum's tiers below, the monastery walls, the old town's flat roofs, and barley fields running out to the mountains.

Gyantse is roughly midway between Lhasa and Shigatse on the southern road, and it is the best-preserved old Tibetan town on the corridor. Break the drive here rather than pushing through.