Labrang Si Monastery

  Xiahe, China
Wednesday, July 17, 2002

The day where we walk up a mountain the wrong way, talk to monks about football, spin lots of prayer wheels and help a monk change his mobile phone ring.

We got up early as we had lots to pack into our one full day in Xiahe. First on the 'to do' list was a walk up to the top of the hill behind the monastery. We had spotted the track eating lunch on the balcony yesterday and had been informed that it was about a 4 hour round walk. We were pretty impressed when we reached the top in just under and hour! The views all along the way were breathtaking, you could see all of the monastery which seemed to be almost as big as the town itself, the monks living quarters (all laid out in lots of small square courtyards) stretched on for miles. We met several pilgrims on the route chanting and praying as they walked which added an exotic feel to the pleasant uphill ramble (shame we didn't notice which way they were walking!). At the top of the hill we found a small incense fire smoldering away, with paper confetti with prayers on scattered all around it. We sat next to it and ate our breakfast... more freshly cooked popcorn and bananas!


Setting off on the kora

Eating popcorn for breakfast

We started walking down towards what looked like a small ruin covered in prayer flags, but were intercepted by two pilgrims who showed us in no uncertain terms that we were walking the wrong way and would have to retrace our steps all the way back the way we came! On reflection everyone we met had been going the other way... In Tibetan Buddhism you have to circle any religious building or site clockwise, and we hadn't realised that our path was actually part of an extended kora around the monastery. I never really understood the importance, but after that we walked practically everywhere clockwise in Tibetan areas, and must have travelled much further for it! We followed the two pilgrims back along the kora path towards the town. They stopped at certain points to prostrate or pray, and unsure quite what we should do, we stopped too.

Back in the village we went for lunch at the snowlands cafe. Unfortunately momos were off the menu, so we had fried yak meat, rice and thugka - a type of Tibetan soup, all washed down with banana yak-milkshake, Mmmmmmm! Refreshed, we set off to do the prayer wheel circuit of the monastery. It was once in a life time experience, hard to know quite what you should be feeling. The lines of wheels stretched on and on far into the distance, we must have spun thousands of them.


Spinning prayer wheels

After about a minute my right arm began to ache and watching the wheels constantly spinning was hypnotic and made me feel dizzy. It was hard to imagine doing it every day, it made me realise quite how important religion is to people here. It was interesting to watch other people on the circuit, most seemed to go much faster and overtook us (maybe trying to fit a quick circuit into their lunchbreak?!), some would spend ages spinning the huge wheels at each corner, one woman was simply spinning one wheel over and over again whilst singing - a favourite prayer perhaps. In total we must have spent about an hour doing the kora, by the time we finished it was hard to know what to say. I'm sure we must have undone any bad karma we got from walking the wrong way in the morning though!

After walking the kora we went to join a tour to see inside the monastery. We got to the ticket office about half an hour early, so we were in no great rush joining the ticket queue. However, about 20 minutes later we were no closer to the tiny window through which a monk was selling tickets - Chinese tourists were constantly pushing and shoving their way into the queue! We found it quite funny to see how irate and competitive they were getting, but had to join in the jostling as our tour was due to leave soon. Soon I was up near the window, elbow-jostling with all the little Chinese women, and laughing as Andrew lifted lots of baseball caps of heads in the crush of people. Close to the window people still didn't concede that the person in front of it were next in line, they would simply push their hand full of money through from the back!!! At one point the poor monk, who had obviously drawn a short straw to be there in the first place had enough and slammed shut the window, disappearing for a few minutes, it was all just unbelievable! Fortunatley we got tickets in time and met our excellent English speaking guide, a youngish monk with a great sense of humour. He told us that all of the Labrang monks are heavily into their football, and were looking forward to a weeks holiday when they were going into the grasslands for a big tournament! It certainly was a bizarre sight to see football boot poking out from underneath the crimson robes.


Footballing monk!

Our guide showed us around all the main temples and halls and told us about the monasteries history. Labrang means 'seat of lamas' and is the seat of one of the most important lamas, making it one of the most sacred Tibetan monasteries, even though it is in China. The lama wasn't there though, he spends most of his time in Lhanzou now working for the provincial government. The most impressive building was a huge dark hall, where all 1200 monks gather at festival time. The sight was breathtaking, but I could only imagine what it would have been like to see it full. At the end of the tour I asked the monk about the significance of the different colour robes, from pink through to a orangey-red. Was it a sign of college membership, or perhaps a hierarchy? He replied by saying, I wear this because it is my favourite colour - simple then! Actually I was surprised by the freedom and apparent lack of structure in the monks lives, they ate when and where they pleased and we often saw them jumping on and off buses in town.

In the evening we couldn't resist going back to Snowlands to experience a yak burger - again excellent, and we had a mouthwatering dish of rice with sweet potato, butter and sugar, which I absolutely loved, but never found again. We then had a very surreal experience of helping a monk to change the ringing tone on his mobile phone... Nokia don't have a Tibetan language option! Back at Tara's we sat up on the roof playing chess, and had a few beers with a few Aussies who had been teaching English on their gap years... one of which told a really long and awful joke about nuns!

Top Tips!
- Find out the times of English tours around the monastery, theres lots of useful stuff to learn, and our monk was great fun to chat to!
- Don't take photos of the Dalai Lama as gifts, they are not allowed. Take one of Beckam or Owen and they will love you though!
- Eat yak food! Burgers, milkshakes, momos, even just plain old fried yak, it really is gorgeous!
- Leave your British queuing skills at home and be prepared to elbow your way in!