The Jokhang Temple, center of the Tibetan Buddhist world.  It has existed at this site in Lhasa, in one form or another, for well over thirteen centuries.  The temple was built over top of a lake that was filled in during construction; a working well of water from that lake apparently still exists here.  The lake was thought to be the heart of a demoness - legend has it that Tibet rests on the back of a sleeping demoness - and the temple was placed on top of the lake to rid it of evil.

In front of the Jokhang, locals clean candle holders that will soon be filled again with yak butter.  I imagine these guys stay busy; at any given moment in the temple, seemingly thousands of yak butter candles are burning.

A wall near the temple entryway.  The Jokhang started out small - Lhasa was not so important back then - but many renovations expanded it over the centuries.  The biggest were undertaken by the fifth Dalai Lama (who also built the Potala Palace) when the Jokhang temple was already around a thousand years old.

Atop the Jokhang Temple, looking down into its rooftop courtyard; most of the remaining photographs on this page were taken in and around the courtyard.  As with temples throughout this trip, photography was not allowed inside, but the outside is colorful and decorative enough to keep a camera busy.  The orange structure across the way is the private quarters of the Dalai Lama.

Eave, beam, and ceiling decorations in a hall on the roof of the Jokhang...

...and the next layer of decorations behind that column.

On the roof of the Jokhang.  Songtsen Gampo, a Tibetan king, is credited not only with building the Jokhang Temple but also with founding Lhasa and introducing Buddhism to Tibet in a big way.

Bright colors adorning halls on the roof of the Jokhang.  King Songtsen Gampo had two wives, one from Nepal, one from China.  His Chinese wife, Princess Wencheng, was the one who determined the evilness of that lake and the subsequent location of this temple.

Roof edging atop the Jokhang Temple.  When Princess Wencheng first came to Tibet with her husband, after their marriage in the year 641, she brought with her two statues of the Buddha, one of which resides within the Jokhang today.  That statue is the most important and most sacred image of Buddha in Tibet.  Most of the rest of the statues within the Jokhang are less than 25 years old.

A doorway, with colorful decoration above.  So how did Princess Wencheng get that statue of the Buddha in the first place?  Her father, a Tang dynasty emperor in China who had received it as a gift from a king in India, gave it to her.  That was quite a gift: the statue was supposedly created during the Buddha’s life, hence its importance.

On the roof of the Jokhang.  After Songtsen Gampo died, Wencheng hid the statue, fearing a Chinese invasion.  The Jokhang Temple has indeed been sacked a number of times over history - the Mongols get credit for a few of those - but the worst damage was inflicted by Chinese during two recent decades, from the Tibetan uprising in 1959 to the end of China’s Cultural Revolution.  There’s little evidence of that damage within the temple today.

The private quarters of the Dalai Lama, on the north side of the courtyard, currently unoccupied.

From atop the Jokhang, a view of the Potala Palace...

...and from the same spot, a view of the Barkhor in front of the Jokhang, with the Potala Palace in the distance above the buildings on the right.  During my previous visit, this was a huge, muddy pit undergoing reconstruction that made the visit unpleasant.  Things look much better today.

Again from the same spot, a look back onto the roof of the Jokhang.  Actually, my whole stay in Lhasa was far better this time than last - perhaps because the hotel was much nicer, or because the police presence was far less, or because the monks within the Jokhang were more pleasant this time.

A street of the Barkhor, the sacred path circling the Jokhang Temple, viewed from atop a restaurant along its path.  According to ritual, one is supposed to walk along the Barkhor around the Jokhang in a clockwise direction, and for the most part, people do.  However, the many shopowners along the Barkhor typically do not; otherwise it might take them fifteen minutes just to walk next door.

A Tibetan girl, her parents nearby, on the Barkhor in front of the Jokhang Temple.  Behind her, worshipers prostrate themselves in front of the temple.

Hundreds and hundreds of booths and shops along the Barkhor sell an amazing volume of cheap trinkets, some of the most popular being prayer wheels.  Made with the cheapest plastic, tin and wood you’ll ever see, they cost around two dollars - and even at that are way overpriced.  As mentioned on a previous page, I had much better luck finding much higher quality goods at the Tibet Museum.

A Tibetan woman spins a much larger prayer wheel, a very common sight around Lhasa.  Just as the path around the Jokhang is traveled only clockwise, a prayer wheel is spun only clockwise, as viewed from the top.

A final look at the Jokhang Temple.  With this, the Lifeline Express road trip from Beijing to Lhasa came to an end; this was our last sightseeing visit as a group.  The following morning would bring a long bus ride to Lhasa’s airport nearly sixty miles away, followed by a long flight to Beijing.  I hope to someday drive across China once again, but along a different route - perhaps approaching Tibet from Yunnan Province, a journey that I hear has some stunning scenery of its own along the way.  In the meantime, I’ll consider this a once-in-a-lifetime journey.