Labrang Monastery

Interesting facts

The monastery kitchen keeps copper cauldrons so large that one is said to hold enough to cook four whole oxen.

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

The American journalist Harrison Forman spent months here in the early 1930s and tried to persuade its leaders to start their own air force.

Labrang traditionally counted 108 branch monasteries, in fact more, spread from Gansu and Qinghai to Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Shanxi and Beijing.

The monastic year was divided into nine terms: four of a month, two of twenty days and three of fifteen days.

The Hevajra college, built in 1879, was modelled on the Namgyal college of the Potala Palace in Lhasa.

The Upper Tantric college of 1941 is roofed in green glazed tiles and is popularly called the Green Tile Temple.

The Maitreya Temple keeps a copy of the Kangyur, the Tibetan Buddhist canon, written in gold and silver ink.

A temple called Shou'an Si bears a name board granted by the Jiaqing Emperor in four scripts: Chinese, Tibetan, Manchu and Mongolian.

The medical college, founded in the 1780s, has eighteen paintings of the body's channels along the porch of its hall.

Why it is worth it

In a valley of the Daxia River, on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, Labrang is less a single monastery than a monastic town: a dense cluster of whitewashed halls, chapels, colleges and monks' quarters, crowned with gilded roofs and surrounded by long galleries of prayer wheels that pilgrims turn as they circle the complex. It is one of the six great monasteries of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, the largest in southern Gansu, and holds more monks than any other monastery outside the Tibet Autonomous Region.

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. During the Cultural Revolution the monks were sent away; monks returned to the monastery in 1980. In 1985 a fire destroyed the great assembly hall, which was rebuilt in its old form and consecrated in 1990, and a major restoration of the whole complex was completed in 2021.

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. The town around the monastery, Labrang in Xiahe County, is about four hours by road from the provincial capital Lanzhou.

Getting there

Labrang Monastery is on the western side of Labrang town (Xiahe), in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu. The nearest airport is Gannan Xiahe (GXH), about 43 km away. The provincial capital Lanzhou is about four hours away by road.

Labrang Monastery

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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