Lhasa

The imperial capital

Lhasa lies in the valley of the Kyichu, a tributary of the Yarlung Tsangpo, at about 3,650 metres. Its history as a capital begins with Songtsen Gampo, the king who unified Tibet in the early seventh century and made Lhasa his seat. Tibetan tradition says he married two foreign princesses, Bhrikuti of Nepal and Wencheng of China, each of whom brought an image of the Buddha. The Jokhang, founded around 641, was built to house one of them, and the Ramoche for the other; the image now in the Jokhang, the Jowo Rinpoche, is the one tradition associates with Wencheng. The Nepali princess is not attested in Chinese records, and some historians doubt her historicity, but the story became central to Tibetan accounts of how Buddhism arrived.

A pillar inscription of the treaty between Tibet and Tang China, sworn in 821–822, still stands in front of the Jokhang. After the empire collapsed in the 840s Lhasa lost its political role for several centuries, though the Jokhang remained a place of pilgrimage.

The Gelug city

In 1409 Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school, instituted the great prayer festival, the Monlam, at the Jokhang, and in the same years his disciples founded the three great monasteries around Lhasa: Ganden in 1409, Drepung in 1416 and Sera in 1419. Drepung grew into one of the largest monasteries in the world.

In 1642 the Fifth Dalai Lama became ruler of Tibet with Mongol support and made Lhasa his capital, and three years later he began the Potala. The city grew around the Jokhang, with the Barkhor, the circuit of streets along which pilgrims walk clockwise round the temple, at its heart. From the eighteenth century Qing imperial representatives, the ambans, were stationed in Lhasa, with varying influence.

The twentieth century

In 1904 a British expedition under Francis Younghusband fought its way to Lhasa and imposed a treaty. After the fall of the Qing in 1911–12 the Thirteenth Dalai Lama expelled the Chinese garrison and governed Tibet as an independent state in practice until 1950. In 1950 the People's Liberation Army entered eastern Tibet, and in 1951 Chinese troops arrived in Lhasa under an agreement imposed on the Tibetan government. In March 1959 an uprising in the city was suppressed, and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India.

Lhasa has since become the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region and has grown rapidly, with a large Han Chinese population. Protests in 1987–89 and in 2008 were suppressed. The Jokhang, the Potala and the Norbulingka are World Heritage Sites.