Ganden Monastery

Lia and I left Lhasa before seven, and the drive to Ganden took a little over an hour and a half, the road climbing steadily until the Kyichu valley dropped away below us and Wangbur Mountain filled the windshield. Forty-seven kilometers doesn’t sound like much until you’re gaining altitude the entire way — by the time our driver cut the engine at 3,800 meters, I was already breathing like I’d run somewhere. I remember standing by the car for a full minute just looking at the ridge, the buildings scattered across it in white and dark red, before I trusted my legs to start walking.

What got me about Ganden wasn’t just the view, though the view is the kind that makes you stop mid-sentence. It’s that everything here has been rebuilt at least once. Je Tsongkhapa founded this place in 1409, and it became the seat of the Gelugpa school — the tradition that eventually produced the Dalai Lamas — which made Ganden one of the “Three Great Monasteries” alongside Sera and Drepung. Then in 1959 it was largely destroyed, and during the Cultural Revolution what remained was dynamited. Walking the kora path around the ridge, I kept noticing the seams: an older stone base under newer plaster, a roofline that didn’t quite match its neighbor. Our guide pointed out where Tsongkhapa’s tomb had once stood, gold and silver, before it was gone. It’s a strange thing to grieve a building you never saw.

We spent a while in the main assembly hall, where a handful of monks were chanting in a corner while tourists and pilgrims moved quietly around them. An old woman ahead of us pressed her forehead to a pillar and stayed there long enough that I felt like I was intruding just by watching. Lia bought a stick of incense from a stand outside and lit it at one of the small shrines along the kora, and I did the same, mostly because it felt wrong not to. Outside, the wind kept snapping the prayer flags hard enough that you could hear them over conversation, and every so often a monk in maroon robes would cross the courtyard at a pace that made me feel, again, embarrassingly out of breath.

By early afternoon the clouds had rolled in over the far ridges, and our driver mentioned, not for the first time, that this road gets unreliable once the snow starts. I believed him. When to go: aim for May through October, when the mountain road holds up and the thinner clouds actually let you see what you climbed all that way for.