Jokhang

The Jokhang is the most revered temple in Tibet, and the most closely watched.

The Jowo

The temple holds the Jowo Shakyamuni, an image of the Buddha as a young man, and the single most venerated object in Tibetan Buddhism. Pilgrims cross the plateau to see it, some prostrating the entire way, measuring the distance with their bodies over months.

The detail most accounts get backwards: the Jowo came to Tibet with Princess Wencheng of Tang China in 640, but it was first installed at Ramoche, and moved to the Jokhang later. The images were swapped, traditionally to hide the Jowo from an anticipated Chinese army.

Songtsen Gampo built the oldest part around 652. The fifth Dalai Lama carried out the last great renovation in 1610.

Whose temple it is

The Gelug school administers it. But devotion to the Jowo belongs to every Tibetan tradition, and to Mongolian Buddhists as well, it predates the schools entirely, and none of them has a proprietary claim on it.

The Barkhor

The circuit around the temple is walked clockwise by pilgrims, turning prayer wheels. It is also the main commercial street of the old city, and the principal site of Tibetan political demonstration, which is why it is lined with police, surveillance and, since 2008, fixed checkpoints.

1966

Red Guards attacked the temple on 24 August 1966. For roughly a decade there was no worship. Parts of the complex were used for pigs, as a slaughterhouse, and as army barracks. Scriptures were burned. Much of the statuary was destroyed or removed.

Renovation followed between 1972 and 1980, and UNESCO added the temple to the Potala listing in 2000.

The 2018 fire

A fire broke out on 17 February 2018, during Losar.

State media reported it quickly contained, with no damage to relics or to the Jowo. Images and video circulating on Chinese social media were removed within hours, and foreign journalists and independent assessors were not given access.

The extent of the damage is not established. That sentence is the honest one and it should not be improved on. It may well be that the official account is accurate and the fire was minor. It may not be. The point is that at a site of this importance, in 2018, there is no way for anyone outside the administration to know, and that opacity is itself a fact about the site worth recording.

The Jokhang's founding legend involves two foreign princesses, a filled-in lake, and an unresolved question about which of them actually brought the temple's most important statue.

Two brides, two statues

Tradition credits Songtsen Gampo with building the Jokhang in the seventh century to house Buddhist images brought by his two foreign wives: the Nepali princess Bhrikuti and the Chinese princess Wencheng. Later tradition attributes the temple's central image, the Jowo Shakyamuni, to Wencheng specifically, though some versions of the story and some scholarship suggest the statues associated with each princess may have been moved or exchanged between temples over subsequent centuries, leaving the precise original arrangement uncertain rather than fixed.

Built over a filled lake

Legend holds the temple site was originally a lake, filled in using earth carried by goats to create solid ground for construction, a founding story that lent the area a specific place name referencing the goats involved, still reflected in the Tibetan name for the temple's precinct.

A blend, not a single style

The Jokhang's architecture combines Tibetan design with Nepali and Han Chinese elements, read as a direct architectural record of the diplomatic marriages credited with founding it, predating by centuries the temple's later role as the destination of the Barkhor pilgrim circuit built up around it.