Kumbum Butter Sculpture Festival

The Butter Sculpture Festival at Kumbum Monastery takes place on the fifteenth day of the first Tibetan lunar month (usually February), and is one of the most unusual religious festivals in China. Monks spend weeks creating enormous three-dimensional sculptures from coloured yak butter — elaborate tableaux depicting scenes from Buddhist mythology, often several metres tall and containing dozens of individual figures.

The sculptures are displayed in outdoor frames along the monastery's main path, illuminated by butter lamps, for a single night. The combination of elaborate handmade art, firelight, crowds of pilgrims, and the cold dark of a Qinghai February is genuinely memorable. Festival-season accommodation in Xining and Huangzhong fills weeks in advance; book early and dress very warmly — temperatures drop well below freezing.

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The butter sculptures at Kumbum are created each year in the weeks before the festival, worked by monks in unheated rooms in the dead of winter — their hands must stay cold to keep the butter from melting as they work. The sculptors practice for years before being permitted to work on the main display pieces. After the festival, when they have been viewed for one night by lantern light, the sculptures are dismantled and the butter is returned to ordinary use.