Ganden Monastery

Mother monastery of the Gelugpa school, dramatically sited 45 km east of Lhasa

Ganden, 45 kilometres east of Lhasa, is the most spectacularly sited of the three great Gelugpa monasteries — built into a natural amphitheatre on the side of Wangbur Mountain at 4,300 metres, with a long view back over the Kyichu valley. It was founded by Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gelug school, in 1409, and was the original seat of his lineage; the abbots of Ganden are the formal head of the school.

The monastery was almost completely destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and has been rebuilt patchily from the 1980s onwards — large stretches remain ruined and visible, giving the site a particular melancholy unlike the more polished Drepung and Sera. The high kora, the circumambulation path around the bowl, takes about an hour and is one of the great walks in Tibet, with prayer-flag-draped passes and views into the valley below.

Day trips from Lhasa typically combine Ganden with a stop at the village of Dechen on the way back. Going in winter is wonderful and uncrowded; in summer the wildflowers on the slopes around the monastery are a small additional reward.

things to do monastery historical site
A story
Ganden was the most thoroughly destroyed of the great Tibetan monasteries during the Cultural Revolution — Red Guards dynamited it in the late 1960s, and as late as the 1980s it stood as a field of rubble. The reformer Tsongkhapa, who founded it in 1409, had his tomb here; the embalmed body was burned by the Red Guards and only fragments of bone preserved by a monk survived.