The old town clusters around the base of the monastery promontory, a network of narrow lanes lined with flat-roofed Tibetan houses decorated with prayer flags and wood carvings. It is a smaller and quieter version of the Barkhor area in Lhasa, and the relative scarcity of tourists gives it a more lived-in quality. In the mornings, women in traditional dress carry butter offerings up toward the monastery, and the smell of juniper incense carries down from the courtyard above.
The contrast with the newer Chinese-built districts to the south and east is sharp. The new town has wider streets, Han Chinese restaurants, karaoke bars, and the standard infrastructure of a mid-sized Chinese city. The old town is where Chamdo's Kham Tibetan character is most legible — the jewellery, the dialect, the way people dress, and the particular quality of Khampa hospitality that travellers on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway have remarked on for generations.