Gyantse Kumbum

Gyantse

Gyantse stands in the Nyang valley on the route from Lhasa to Shigatse and to Sikkim and Bhutan in the south. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the seat of a local ruling family, princes who held the area under the Sakya and then the Phagmodrupa rulers of central Tibet. Its fortress, the dzong, stands on a rock above the town.

The greatest of the princes, Rabten Kunsang Phag, founded the Palcho monastery in 1418. Unusually, it housed communities of several schools, Sakya, Gelug and others, within one walled enclosure. Its main assembly hall holds large images and murals of the same period as the stupa.

The Kumbum

The Kumbum, "a hundred thousand images", was begun around 1427 beside the assembly hall. It is a stupa that can be entered: a stepped base of four storeys, each with chapels opening off its terraces, carries a great drum, a dome and a tall spire. A visitor climbs it in a clockwise spiral, passing from chapel to chapel. The chapels hold painted clay images and walls covered with paintings arranged as mandalas, so that the ascent leads through the deities of the tantric scriptures from the lower to the higher classes, ending at the top with the supreme buddha of the highest tantras.

The paintings combine Newar influence from the Kathmandu valley with Chinese elements and a distinct local style. Inscriptions name some of the artists, who came from the Gyantse area and neighbouring districts. Because the stupa was not rebuilt, and survived later damage better than many monasteries, it is one of the most complete fifteenth-century programmes of religious art anywhere in Tibet. The Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci, who studied it in the 1930s, did much to bring it to wide attention.

1904

In 1904 a British expedition under Francis Younghusband advanced from Sikkim towards Lhasa to force the Tibetan government into an agreement. After a massacre of Tibetan troops at Guru on the way, the British occupied Gyantse, where the Tibetans held the dzong. In July 1904, after weeks of fighting, the British stormed the fortress with artillery. The road to Lhasa was then open, and the expedition reached the city in August. Under the treaty that followed, Gyantse became a British trade mart, with a trade agent and a small escort, which India inherited in 1947 and gave up in 1954.

Later history

The monastery was damaged during the Cultural Revolution, and some of the Kumbum's images were destroyed or defaced, but much of the painting survived. It was restored from the 1980s onward and is again in religious use, with a small community of monks.