The Most Beautiful Monasteries in Asia

36 places in 14 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Khor Virap

   Armenia · 8.7 km from Artashat39.878° N 44.576° E

   

   According to Armenian tradition, King Tiridates III imprisoned Gregory the Illuminator here for thirteen years in an underground dungeon, where he survived thanks to a Christian woman who secretly dropped bread to him. When the king fell into madness, it was Gregory who was said to have cured him, and Tiridates converted; Armenia's adoption of Christianity as a state religion is traditionally dated to 301. The pit that pilgrims climb down into today is about 6 metres deep and just over 4 metres wide, beneath the small chapel of St George.

   Did you know? Gregory's cell is the farther of two pits beneath the St George chapel, reached through an unmarked hole, a short stair and a long ladder.

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2. 02 Paro Taktsang

   Bhutan · 8.7 km from Paro27.492° N 89.363° E

   

   This cave is one of thirteen "tiger lair" sites across the Himalayas where Guru Rinpoche is said to have meditated, but it's the one that lent its name — Taktsang, tiger's lair — to all the rest. The monastery physically enclosing that sacred cave wasn't built until 1692, nearly a thousand years after the legendary flight, commissioned by the ruler Gyalse Tenzin Rabgye.

   Did you know? The reconstruction after the 1998 fire cost about 135 million ngultrum and was overseen under King Jigme Singye Wangchuck.

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3. 03 Punakha Dzong

   Bhutan · 0.3 km from Punakha27.582° N 89.863° E

   

   The dzong was built in 1637–38 by Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the lama and statesman who unified Bhutan, with the master builder Zowe Palep. It served as the seat of government and the capital of the country until 1955, when the administration moved to Thimphu. Six storeys high and around 180 metres long, it is laid out around three courtyards. The dzong guards the most precious relics of Bhutan, including the sacred Rangjung Kharsapani and the mortal remains of the Zhabdrung himself and of the treasure-revealer Pema Lingpa.

   Did you know? In 1639 a chapel was built to hold the weapons captured from a Tibetan army defeated here, and the Punakha festival still re-enacts that victory.

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4. 04 Haghpat Monastery

   Armenia · 36.4 km from Vanadzor41.094° N 44.712° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The core is the Cathedral of Surb Nshan (the Holy Sign), begun by the queen and finished in 991 by her son Smbat II. Its dome stands on four massive piers, and the outer walls are cut by deep triangular niches, a signature of tenth-century Armenian masonry. Inside, the apse still carries a painted Christ Pantocrator, and a relief on the east gable shows the founder's sons, the princes Smbat and Kiurike, beside Queen Khosrovanuysh. Around it the monks added a small domed church of St Gregory in 1005, a free-standing three-storey bell tower in 1245, a chapel to the Mother of God, a large refectory and a library whose floor was later sunk with clay storage jars.

   Did you know? The eighteenth-century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova served as a priest at Haghpat after his ordination.

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5. 05 Drepung Monastery

   People's Republic of China · 6.2 km from Lhasa29.677° N 91.047° E

   

   Drepung became the largest of the three great Gelug monasteries of central Tibet, together with Sera and Ganden, and for centuries it was one of the biggest monastic institutions anywhere: a British visitor in the 1930s put its population at around 7,700 monks. It was organised much like a medieval university, with separate colleges such as Loseling and Gomang that had their own curricula, debating courtyards and regional followings, drawing students from across Tibet and Mongolia. Its scholastic standards earned it comparison with Nalanda, the great Buddhist university of ancient India.

   Did you know? The monastery was founded in 1416 by Jamyang Choje, a disciple of the reformer Tsongkhapa.

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6. 06 Sevanavank

   Armenia · 24.8 km from Gavar40.564° N 45.011° E

   

   The monastery was founded in 874 by Princess Mariam, a daughter of the Bagratid ruler Ashot I. Both surviving churches, Surb Arakelots (the Holy Apostles) and Surb Astvatsatsin (the Holy Mother of God), follow a compact cruciform plan topped by an eight-sided drum. Beside them are the ruins of a gavit, an entrance hall whose roof once rested on six wooden columns. For long periods Sevanavank was a place of strict discipline for monks of Etchmiadzin who had broken the rules; the French traveller Jean-Marie Chopin, who visited in 1830, described the ascetic life there, and manuscripts were still being copied by hand around 1850.

   Did you know? Besides being a monastery, the island was a medieval fortress, and remains of its walls can still be traced on the western side.

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7. 07 Sümela Monastery

   Turkey · 29.1 km from Gümüşhane40.690° N 39.658° E

   

   Tradition holds that the monastery was founded around 386, in the reign of Theodosius I, by two Athenian monks, Barnabas and Sophronius, who came here with an icon of the Virgin believed to have been painted by Saint Luke. The monastery was dedicated to the Virgin — Panagia Soumela in Greek — and took on its present form in the thirteenth century, when the Empire of Trebizond flourished on this coast; Emperor Alexios III Komnenos was among its patrons. The monks stayed through Ottoman times and left only in 1923, in the population exchange between Turkey and Greece. The famous icon went to Greece, where a new monastery of Panagia Soumela on Mount Vermio now keeps it.

   Did you know? In 1931 the Greek premier Venizelos asked Turkey's Ismet Inonu for permission, and the monk Ambrosios returned to dig up the icon and treasures.

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8. 08 Thikse Monastery

   India · 14.6 km from Leh34.056° N 77.667° E

   

   Inside the complex are courtyards, assembly halls and small dark chapels full of murals, thangkas, stupas and ranks of bronze images. The most famous room is modern: a temple housing a seated Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, about 15 metres high and rising through two storeys, so that visitors on the upper floor meet his face at eye level. It was made to mark the visit of the 14th Dalai Lama in 1970 and took four years to complete. The gilded face, painted blue hair and calm gaze make it one of the most photographed images in the Himalaya.

   Did you know? The Maitreya was created by local Ladakhi artists working under master sculptor Nawang Tsering, and it is the largest Buddha image in Ladakh.

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9. 09 Ferapontov Monastery

   Russia59.956° N 38.568° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Its treasure is inside the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin, built in 1490 by masters from Rostov as the first stone church of the Beloozero region. An inscription by the north door records that its walls were painted by the icon painter Dionisius and his sons between 6 August and 8 September 1502. The result, roughly 600 square metres of painting in some 300 scenes, is the only mural cycle securely documented as the work of Dionisius, the leading painter of Muscovite Russia at the turn of the 16th century. The painting is admired for the tonal richness of its soft colours, and the cathedral is regarded as the last medieval Russian church whose walls survive fully painted.

   Did you know? The paintings unfold several great cycles, including the Akathist hymn to the Virgin, the Ecumenical Councils and the Last Judgement.

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10. 10 Tatev Monastery

    Armenia · 24.3 km from Kapan39.379° N 46.250° E

    

    Around this church the complex grew over a thousand years: the church of Saint Gregory, the small church of the Holy Mother of God of 1087, 14th-century fortifications on three sides, and, in the 17th and 18th centuries, a ring of monks' cells, refectory, bakery, storerooms and classrooms along the walls. In the courtyard stands the Gavazan, a slim column about 8 m high, crowned by a carved cross-stone and dating from 906. It was built so that it can sway without falling, and it is one of the small marvels that visitors come to find.

    Did you know? At its height the monastery owned 47 villages outright and collected tithes from 677 more across Syunik.

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11. 11 Church of Saint Thaddeus

    Iran39.092° N 44.544° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    According to the tradition of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the apostle Thaddeus preached in Armenia and was martyred there in the first century, and a church was raised over his grave; some traditions put its founding as early as AD 66. Those dates are legend rather than record. The monastery suffered in the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and was heavily damaged by an earthquake in 1319; only parts of the east end, around the altar apse, are thought to go back to the 7th century.

    Did you know? Mongol armies damaged the monastery twice in the 13th century, first in 1231 and again in 1242.

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12. 12 Novodevichy Convent

    Russia · 4.8 km from Moscow55.726° N 37.557° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The oldest building is the five-domed Smolensk Cathedral at the centre, dated to 1524–25 but probably rebuilt in the mid-16th century. Its frescoes are among the finest in Moscow, and its gilded iconostasis of 1685 holds 16th-century icons given by Boris Godunov alongside work by the 17th-century painters Simon Ushakov and Fyodor Zubov. Most of the rest dates from the 1680s, when the regent Sophia Alekseyevna had the convent remodelled: the crenellated walls with twelve towers, two gate churches, the refectory and the slender six-tier bell tower, 72 metres high, which was the tallest structure in Moscow after the Kremlin's Ivan the Great bell tower.

    Did you know? Closed in 1922, the convent first became a museum called Tsarevna Sophia and the Streltsy, later renamed the Museum of Women's Emancipation.

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13. 13 Erdene Zuu Monastery

    Mongolia47.202° N 102.843° E

    

    The monastery was founded in 1585 by Abtai Sain Khan, ruler of the Khalkha Mongols, after his meeting with the Third Dalai Lama and the adoption of Tibetan Buddhism as the state religion; his grandson Zanabazar would become the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, head of Mongolian Buddhism. The builders reused stones from Karakorum's ruins. The surrounding wall was conceived as a Buddhist rosary of 108 stupas, the sacred number, though the plan was probably never fully completed in its first form. The monastery was damaged in 1688 during the wars between the Dzungars and the Khalkha.

    Did you know? Hearing that story, the Yongzheng Emperor is said to have granted the Orkhon River a princely title and an annual allowance of 300 taels of silver.

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14. 14 Noravank

    Armenia · 12.1 km from Yeghegnadzor39.685° N 45.233° E

    

    The name means "new monastery". A church stood here before the 9th century, but the community took shape in 1105, when Bishop Hovhannes, a former abbot of Vahanavank, settled on the site. In the 13th and 14th centuries Noravank became the residence of the bishops of Syunik and the burial place of the Orbelian princes, and a centre of learning tied to the nearby University of Gladzor. Two masters shaped what survives: the architect Siranes, and Momik, a sculptor and manuscript painter active here in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.

    Did you know? Stepanos Orbelian, metropolitan of Syunik, completed his History of the Province of Syunik at Noravank in 1299, a key source on medieval Armenia.

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15. 15 Key Monastery

    India32.298° N 78.012° E

    

    Its origins are traced to the eleventh century and to Dromtön, a disciple of the Indian teacher Atisha, though what stands today is the product of repeated rebuilding. Mongol raiders plundered it in the seventeenth century; it was sacked again during the wars between Ladakh and Kullu around 1821, damaged by Dogra and Sikh forces in 1841, swept by fire in the same decade and shaken by an earthquake in 1975. Each time the monks returned and built again, which is why the complex reads as a palimpsest of rooms of different ages rather than a single design. It now belongs to the Gelug school, alongside Tabo and Dhankar, the other great gompas of the valley.

    Did you know? The mid-17th-century Mongol raid, during the time of the Fifth Dalai Lama, marked the moment the monastery passed to the Gelug school.

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16. 16 Pskovo-Pechersky Dormition Monastery

    Russia57.810° N 27.615° E

    

    Monastic tradition records that the caves became known to local people in the late 14th century, and that around 1470 a priest named Ioann, who had served in Yuryev, today's Tartu, settled here, helped by his wife Maria, who later took vows as Vassa. He dug the cave church of the Dormition into the hillside, and it was consecrated in 1473; Ioann took monastic vows as Jonah and is venerated as one of the founders. The church still has only a front facade, the rest of it lying inside the hill. The real flowering came under the abbot Kornily in the mid-16th century, who extended the caves, built new churches and, in 1558–1565, surrounded the monastery with stone walls and towers.

    Did you know? According to tradition, Ivan the Terrible killed abbot Kornily in 1570, and the path along which his body was carried is still called the Bloody Path.

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17. 17 Wat Mahathat (Ayutthaya)

    Thailand · 0.2 km from Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya14.357° N 100.567° E

    

    That tower had a troubled life. It fell in 1631 under King Prasat Thong and was raised again within two years to roughly fifty metres, crowned by a metal spire; by 1637 it was ringed by a roofed cloister and a crowd of smaller chedis. It collapsed for good in 1911 and was never rebuilt, so what the visitor now walks through is the footprint of a sacred city in miniature: the base of the central prang, broken Buddha images along the lines of the old cloister, and chedis whose brick cores show where the stucco has fallen away.

    Did you know? The buried deposit sat in a hollow stone pillar about 3.2 metres tall, packed with gold ornaments, bronze images and pewter votive tablets.

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18. 18 St. George's Monastery

    Israel · 20.8 km from Ramallah31.843° N 35.415° E

    

    Monastic life here began around 420, when a few hermits settled around a cave where, according to tradition, the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens. Hermits from the surrounding cliffs gathered there once a week for prayer and a shared meal. Around 480–520 John of Thebes, an Egyptian known as St John of Choziba, organised the community as a monastery dedicated to the Mother of God, and in the sixth and seventh centuries it flourished under St George of Choziba, after whom it came to be named. In 614 Persian forces swept through the valley and killed the monks; their skulls and bones are still kept in a chapel.

    Did you know? His disciple Antony of Choziba wrote his biography, which contains an eyewitness account of the Persian invasion of Palestine in 614.

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19. 19 Eihei-ji Temple

    Japan · 12.4 km from Fukui36.057° N 136.357° E

    

    The temple was founded by the monk Dōgen, who had travelled to Song China in his twenties, trained under the master Rujing at the Tiantong monastery and brought back the practice of shikantaza, "just sitting". After clashing with the established Tendai monasteries around Kyoto, he accepted the invitation of a samurai follower, Hatano Yoshishige, and moved to Yoshishige's lands in Echizen province in 1243. The following year he built a temple called Daibutsu-ji in these mountains, and in 1246 it was renamed Eihei-ji, after the era name of the Han emperor under whom Buddhism was said to have reached China. Dōgen's ashes and those of his successors rest in the Founder's Hall.

    Did you know? The monastic day begins at 3:30 in the morning, an hour later in winter, and lights go out at 9 in the evening.

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20. 20 Monastery of the Temptation

    Palestine · 21.6 km from Ramallah31.875° N 35.432° E

    

    The site is tied to the Gospel story of the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness while tempted by Satan. Christian tradition identifies a cave in this cliff as the place of that retreat, and early Christians called the mountain the Mount of the Temptation; the Crusaders knew it as Mons Quarantana, from the forty days of the fast, a name that survives in the Arabic Deir al-Qurunṭul. The first monastery was built over the cave by the Byzantines in the 6th century. After capturing the region in 1099, the Crusaders raised two churches here, one in a cave halfway up the cliff and one on the summit.

    Did you know? The cable car runs about 1,330 metres from near Tell es-Sultan, with its lower station some 220 metres below sea level.

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21. 21 Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius

    Russia · 3.3 km from Sergiyev Posad56.310° N 38.131° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The oldest stone building is the Trinity Cathedral of 1422, raised over the saint's grave, where his relics are still venerated by a steady stream of pilgrims. Its interior was painted by the greatest icon painters of medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev and Daniil Chyorny, and Rublev's Trinity, the most celebrated Russian icon, was made for this church. Nearby, the much larger Assumption Cathedral, commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1559 and consecrated in 1585, has an iconostasis of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and walls frescoed in 1684, and Tsar Boris Godunov and his family are buried there.

    Did you know? St Sergius sent two of his monks, Peresvet and Oslyabya, to fight at Kulikovo in 1380, and Peresvet died in single combat as the battle opened.

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22. 22 Lamayuru Monastery

    India34.283° N 76.774° E

    

    It counts among the oldest monasteries in Ladakh. Its roots go back to the 11th century, and before it became a Buddhist house it is said to have been a centre of Bon, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet; its alternative name, Yungdrung, is the Bon word for the swastika, a symbol of eternity in that tradition. Local tradition of the Drikung school holds that the Indian sage Naropa (956–1041) dried up a lake that once filled the whole valley and then founded the monastery, and a cave where he is believed to have meditated is still shown to visitors.

    Did you know? Long before the halls were built, monks used the natural caves of the rock for meditation, forming an early cave monastery.

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23. 23 Labrang Monastery

    People's Republic of China35.194° N 102.505° E

    

    Labrang was founded in 1709 by Ngawang Tsöndrü, the first Jamyang Zhépa, in the traditional Tibetan region of Amdo, where Tibetan and Mongol worlds meet. Its name derives from labrang, the word for a great lama's residence. Over the following two centuries it grew into one of the largest Buddhist monastic universities, with six colleges – one for philosophy and five for tantric studies, medicine and the Kalachakra – and a library that by 1959 counted some 17,800 titles. At its peak in the early twentieth century it housed several thousand monks. It also became a regional power, and between the 1910s and 1920s it repeatedly suffered attacks and occupation by the Hui warlord Ma Qi.

    Did you know? Some 500 small prayer-wheel houses ring the monastery, forming the circuit that pilgrims walk clockwise around it.

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24. 24 Amarbayasgalant Monastery

    Mongolia49.480° N 105.085° E

    

    The monastery was ordered by the Qing Yongzheng Emperor and completed under his successor Qianlong, as a memorial and final resting place for Zanabazar (1635–1723), the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism among the Khalkha Mongols and a towering figure of Mongolian art. Construction began in 1727 and the core was completed by 1736; Zanabazar's remains were brought here in 1779. Local tradition tells that the search party sent to find a site came upon two boys, Amur and Bayasgalant, playing on the steppe, and named the monastery after them; a more prosaic explanation is that the site was where Zanabazar's travelling camp-monastery stood when he died.

    Did you know? The masked Tsam dance was performed here again in 2002 after an interruption of 65 years following the purges.

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25. 25 Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery

    Russia59.857° N 38.369° E

    

    It began in 1397, when the monk Kirill, a former head of Moscow's Simonov Monastery and a disciple of Sergius of Radonezh, dug himself a cave by the lake and put up a small wooden chapel. Moscow's rulers soon valued the community as an outpost on the northern trade routes, and by the 16th century it was the second-largest monastic landowner in Russia. Ivan the Terrible kept a cell here and planned to take vows within its walls. The monastery also held fallen grandees in exile, among them Patriarch Nikon and the boyar Boris Morozov, and in December 1612 it withstood a siege by Polish-Lithuanian irregulars.

    Did you know? A monk of the monastery, Efrosin, produced the final version of the Zadonshchina, the poem on the Battle of Kulikovo, and gave it its title.

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26. 26 Haghartsin Monastery

    Armenia · 23.3 km from Ijevan40.802° N 44.891° E

    

    The monastery is thought to date from the 10th century, and a ruined royal sepulchre beside St Gregory's Church is believed to hold kings of the Kiurikian branch of the Bagratuni dynasty; another view holds that Bagratuni kings Smbat II and Gagik I lie here. Largely destroyed by the Seljuks in the 11th century, Haghartsin revived from 1184 under the Zakarid princes Zakare and Ivane, who made it their family burial ground. After Zakare's death in 1213, Ivane recorded in an inscription that he had built a vaulted hall beside St Gregory's in his brother's memory. The abbot Khachatur of Taron, a renowned musician, made the monastery an important school of church music.

    Did you know? About 103 medieval inscriptions have been recorded on the walls, naming donors, abbots, builders and dates.

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27. 27 Palcho Monastery

    People's Republic of China · 4.7 km from Gyantse28.924° N 89.595° E

    

    Gyantse grew into a princely seat in the 14th and 15th centuries under the overlordship of the Sakya school, and its rulers left three great monuments: the hilltop fortress, or dzong, the monastery assembly hall and the Kumbum. Prince Rabten Kunzang Phak, a devotee of Khedrup Je, the disciple of Tsongkhapa later recognised as the first Panchen Lama, built the main temple, the Tsuklakhang, between 1418 and the mid-1420s, and began the Kumbum in 1427, completing it about ten years later.

    Did you know? The Italian Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci recorded and translated the Kumbum's inscriptions in his study of Gyantse and its monasteries.

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28. 28 Solovetsky Monastery

    Russia65.024° N 35.711° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Monastic life here began in 1429, when the monks Herman and Savvatiy of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery settled on the uninhabited island; in 1436 Zosima founded the community formally, and the three are venerated as its founders. Most of its great buildings date from the sixteenth century: the Dormition Cathedral of 1552–1557, the Transfiguration Cathedral of 1556–1564, the Church of the Annunciation of 1596–1601, and the boulder walls themselves, raised between 1584 and 1594. The walls were tested more than once.

    Did you know? The eight-year siege of 1668–1676 ended not by assault but through betrayal, when a monk showed the tsar's troops a way inside.

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29. 29 Tengboche Monastery

    Nepal27.836° N 86.764° E

    

    It is also the spiritual centre of the Sherpa world. Tengboche was founded in 1916 by Lama Gulu, with close ties to Rongbuk Monastery on the Tibetan side of Everest, from which its lineage came, and it was the first celibate monastery of the Nyingma school in the region. Its history has been one of rebuilding. An earthquake in 1934 destroyed the first buildings, which were raised again under Lama Gulu's successor; in 1989 a fire consumed the main temple with many of its scriptures and paintings, and the present building, rebuilt with donations from around the world, was consecrated in 1993.

    Did you know? The fire of 19 January 1989 that gutted the main temple is attributed to an electrical short circuit.

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30. 30 Larung Gar Buddhist Academy

    People's Republic of China32.153° N 100.469° E

    

    The academy was founded in 1980 by Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, a lama of the Nyingma school who began with a small retreat in the empty valley. Teaching drew students from across the Tibetan regions and beyond, and by the late 1990s reports counted some 10,000 residents — about 4,500 nuns, 4,000 monks and nearly a thousand Han Chinese students. The community is organised into separate institutions for monks, for nuns, for lay practitioners and for international students.

    Did you know? In 1980 the founder had fewer than a dozen students; within about a year more than 100 were living in mud huts in the valley.

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