The Most Beautiful Monasteries in the People's Republic of China
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful monasteries in the People's Republic of China are Drepung Monastery, Labrang Monastery and Palcho Monastery. The list covers 5 monasteries. Last updated 14 October 2026.
On the Tibetan Plateau and its edges, monasteries were towns in their own right: assembly halls, colleges, printing houses and thousands of monks' dwellings spreading over valley floors and hillsides. Tibetan Buddhism shaped an architecture of whitewashed and red walls, gilded roofs and prayer-wheel corridors, set at altitudes where the light is hard and the sky very close.
Labrang Monastery in Xiahe, Gansu, founded in 1709, is one of the six great monasteries of the Gelug school, ringed by a long corridor of prayer wheels. Palcho Monastery in Gyantse is known for its Kumbum, a tiered stupa whose dozens of chapels are filled with murals and statues. Ganden Sumtseling near Shangri-La in Yunnan, founded in 1679, climbs a hill so compactly that it is called the Little Potala. Larung Gar in Sichuan covers a whole valley with thousands of small red cabins around its teaching halls.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Drepung Monastery | Monastery | |
| 2 | Labrang Monastery | Monastery | |
| 3 | Palcho Monastery | Monastery | |
| 4 | Larung Gar Buddhist Academy | Monastery | |
| 5 | Ganden Sumtseling Monastery | Monastery |
01 Drepung Monastery
People's Republic of China · 6.2 km from Lhasa29.677° N 91.047° E
Haogang0325 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lhasa, the historic capital of Tibet, lies in the Kyi Chu valley at about 3,650 metres; its old centre grew up around the Jokhang temple, while the Potala Palace rises on a hill to the west.
Did you know? Drepung is one of the three great Gelug monasteries of central Tibet, alongside Sera and Ganden.
02 Labrang Monastery
People's Republic of China35.194° N 102.505° E
No machine-readable author provided. Mrfish33~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5 The assembly hall of the College of Philosophy, the largest of the halls, was enlarged in 1772 to 140 pillars and could seat three thousand monks. Nearby stand the six-storey Maitreya Temple of 1788, whose gilded roof gave it the popular name Great Golden Temple, with a gilt bronze Maitreya about eight metres tall, and a smaller gilded temple modelled on the Jokhang in Lhasa. The Gongtang Stupa, a gilded chorten, rises among the colleges. Labrang is also a place of great seasonal festivals, when a giant image of the Buddha is unfurled, ritual dances are staged and monks hold public debates.
Did you know? The American journalist Harrison Forman spent months here in the early 1930s and tried to persuade its leaders to start their own air force.
03 Palcho Monastery
People's Republic of China · 4.7 km from Gyantse28.924° N 89.595° E
Image by hbieser from Pixabay The Kumbum is built as a three-dimensional mandala to be climbed clockwise. Its lower storeys are square in plan and the upper ones circular, giving the whole a pyramidal silhouette, and the chapels on each level are arranged as a progressive sequence of tantric deities, rising to a single top chapel devoted to Vajradhara. The murals, in vivid colour and a naturalistic style, are among the finest surviving examples of 15th-century Tibetan painting, with Newar and Chinese influences visible in the figures.
Did you know? The Kumbum rises in nine storeys and holds more than seventy chapels, with counts varying between sources.
04 Larung Gar Buddhist Academy
People's Republic of China32.153° N 100.469° E
Image by 龚 from Pixabay The settlement has also been marked by repeated waves of state-ordered demolition. In 2001 thousands of dwellings were pulled down and many residents sent away, and in 2016 and 2017 another campaign cleared some 1,500 homes and expelled several thousand people. What remains is still a vast and moving place, where the red houses and meditation huts climbing the slopes make the valley look like a single living organism.
Did you know? In 1987 the 10th Panchen Lama gave the academy its official name, Serta Larung Ngarig Nangten Lobling, the Five Sciences Buddhist Academy.
05 Ganden Sumtseling Monastery
People's Republic of China27.864° N 99.704° E
瑞丽江的河水 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The monastery lies just north of Shangri-La, the seat of Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, known in Tibetan as Gyalthang and in Chinese until 2001 as Zhongdian, when it was renamed after the hidden valley of James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Its old Tibetan quarter, Dukezong, is known for its giant prayer wheel.
Did you know? Today about 700 monks live in the monastery, housed in some 200 dwellings spread across the hillside.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful monasteries in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Drepung Monastery ranks first, followed by Labrang Monastery and Palcho Monastery.
- What is the Kumbum of Gyantse?
- A 15th-century chorten at Palcho Monastery built in nine levels; its many small chapels, entered one after another as you climb, hold one of the richest collections of Tibetan murals.
- Which school of Tibetan Buddhism does Labrang belong to?
- Labrang belongs to the Gelug school, the tradition of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, and is one of its six principal monasteries.
- How many monasteries are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 5 monasteries.