Tashilhunpo Monastery

Tashilhunpo is the reason to stop in Shigatse, and it is the monastery that most rewards a first-time visitor to Tibet: large, walled, structurally intact, and busy with pilgrims rather than tour groups. It climbs the slope below Drolmari hill in tiers of whitewashed walls and gilded roofs, and unlike Ganden or Drepung it came through the twentieth century comparatively unharmed.

The Panchen Lama's seat

Founded in 1447 by Gendun Drup, a disciple of Tsongkhapa later recognised retrospectively as the First Dalai Lama, Tashilhunpo became the seat of the Panchen Lamas, the second great incarnation lineage of the Gelug school. That institutional weight is what kept it whole and what fills it: this remains the largest working monastery in Tibet, and the pilgrim traffic through it is continuous.

The Maitreya

The Chapel of Jampa holds the single object people remember — a seated Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, some twenty-six metres high, gilded and jewelled, completed in the early twentieth century under the Ninth Panchen Lama. The chapel is built as a shaft around it, so you meet the statue in sections as you climb: feet, hands, and finally the face, from a gallery near the top.

Elsewhere the tomb chapels of successive Panchen Lamas hold their gold-and-silver reliquary stupas, and the great Kelsang courtyard — flagged, arcaded, hung for festivals — is where the monastery assembles.

Around it

The kora loops the outside of the monastery walls, an easy hour, and is where you will see the most local pilgrims. Above the town, the ruins of the Shigatse Dzong make the obvious second stop and a good view back down over the monastery roofs.

Shigatse is the staging point for the Everest north side and the Nepal border road, so most itineraries pass through with a night here — Tashilhunpo is what that night is for.