Ganden Sumtseling Monastery
Interesting facts
- A flight of 146 steps climbs from the entrance gate to the great assembly hall at the top of the complex.
- The main assembly hall is large enough for more than 1,500 monks to gather for recitation at once.
- Today about 700 monks live in the monastery, housed in some 200 dwellings spread across the hillside.
- Among the monastery's treasures are Buddhist scriptures written on palm leaves.
- The two principal college buildings of the monastery are known in Chinese as Zhacang and Jikang.
- In April 1936, during the Long March, the monastery gave its support to the Red Army general He Long as his troops passed through.
Why it is worth it
Tier upon tier of whitewashed monks' houses climb a hillside above the high plateau of north-west Yunnan, rising towards assembly halls crowned with gilded copper roofs that catch the sun from far across the valley. Ganden Sumtseling, at about 3,380 metres above sea level, is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Yunnan, and its terraced mass on the slope has earned it the nickname of the "Little Potala".
The monastery belongs to the Gelug school, and its foundation is tied to the troubled years of the Revolt of the Three Feudatories. After Mongol and Tibetan forces sent by the Fifth Dalai Lama took control of the Zhongdian area in the 1670s, a series of Gelug monasteries were founded there. Ganden Sumtseling, whose site and name are credited to the Fifth Dalai Lama, was completed in the early 1680s with the approval of the Kangxi Emperor, on the ruins of an older monastery of the Karma Kagyu school. In 1724, when the region passed formally under Yunnan's administration, the Qing court gave it the Chinese name Guihua Si. Over the following decades it grew into a powerful institution with more than a thousand monks, eight regional colleges, known as khamtsen, and extensive lands and herds. The original buildings were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and reconstruction on the old foundations began in the early 1980s.
A flight of steps leads up from the gateway at the foot of the hill to the great assembly hall, where the monks gather for recitation. Inside, among butter lamps and paintings of the life of the Buddha, stands a gilded statue of Shakyamuni about eight metres tall; other halls are dedicated to Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school, and the khamtsen houses of the different districts spread out around the core. Each winter the monastery holds the Gedong festival, when monks in costumes of deities, spirits and animals perform the masked cham dances.
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.
Getting there
Ganden Sumtseling stands about 5 km north of the centre of Shangri-La. Diqing Shangri-La Airport (DIG) is about 8 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Ganden Somtseling Monastery, also known as Somtseling and Guihuasi, is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery situated 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from the city of Shangri-La at elevation 3,380 metres (11,090 ft) in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan. Built in 1679, the monastery is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Diqing and is sometimes referred to as the Little Potala Palace. During the 9th century, high demand for trade goods on the path to Lhasa brought Naxi administrators, Han merchants, and Bai metalsmiths into permanent settlement in what is now modern-day Diqing. This transformed the town into a linguistic and cultural buffer zone where minority groups acted as economic intermediaries between the low valleys of Yunnan and the high Tibetan plateau.
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