Place · Tibetan capital · Tibet
Lhasa
The Tibetan capital of Lhasa — the political and religious capital of Tibet from the 7-century Tibetan Empire through the Dalai Lama theocracy (1642-1959) to the current Chinese administration. The city sits at 3,656m on the Lhasa river. The 7-century Jokhang Temple (holding the Jowo Rinpoche statue, Tibet's most sacred image) and the 1645 Potala Palace (built by the 5th Dalai Lama Lobsang Gyatso as the Tibetan government seat) anchor the city. Lhasa was the residence of 14 Dalai Lamas from the 5th through the 14th, who fled in March 1959 during the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. The city was also named in Sikh janamsakhi tradition as the northern reach of Guru Nanak's third udasi (c.1515) — though no Tibetan source independently confirms the visit. UNESCO World Heritage Site (Potala-Jokhang-Norbulingka) since 1994. The 2008 Lhasa unrest brought international attention to Tibetan status.
- Date
- 1500–1524
- Periods
- Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions, Early Modern Age, British Colonial Age, Republic and Living Practice
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Tradition
- Janamsakhi tradition (Puratan, Bhai Bala, Miharban)
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — Traditional / narrative attribution — janamsakhi, not independently attested
- Location
- 29.652, 91.172
Disputed. The janamsakhis place Nanak here; no independent record of the visit survives, and scholarship treats the janamsakhi travel accounts as hagiography rather than itinerary. Mapped as what the tradition claims, not as an established fact.
Connections (11)
- Life routeGuru Nanak
The third udāsi's northern reach is claimed for Tibet and Lhasa by the janamsākhi lists, with no Tibetan source to set against it. The repository marks the claim; the route over the passes was real and used, but that is an argument from possibility rather than evidence. Some Himalayan Sikh communities maintain the claim and others treat the third udāsi as the least historical of the five, which is an argument conducted entirely within the tradition.
- Mythic sequenceParo Taktsang
The story runs from Tibet to the cliff. Padmasambhava is said to have flown from Tibet to the Paro cliff on the back of a tigress — one of the founding episodes of Himalayan Buddhism — and Taktsang was built in 1692 around the cave where he then meditated. Lhasa is where the Tibetan side of that tradition is centred and where the Jokhang holds the images Songtsen Gampo's reign brought in. The Bhutanese valleys received their Buddhism through Tibet, not directly across the Himalaya.
- Life routeTenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
The 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso left Lhasa on the night of 17 March 1959 after two Chinese artillery shells landed near the Norbulingka during the 1959 Tibetan uprising against the People's Republic of China's occupation of Tibet, and has not returned. The Potala and the Norbulingka were the winter and summer seats of the office from the fifth Dalai Lama onward, so the flight severed a three-hundred-year connection between the lineage and the city it governed. Photographs of him were banned in Tibet from March 1959 until after 1976.
- Trade routeChengdu
Chengdu is the eastern gateway city for Tibet and the primary air hub between Lhasa and the rest of China — Chengdu Shuangliu airport runs 15-plus daily flights to Lhasa Gongkar. Historically Chengdu was the Chinese terminus of the Tea Horse Road, down which Pu'er and Yunnan black tea travelled by porter and yak-caravan to Tibet in exchange for Tibetan ponies — the trade is attested from the Tang period and ran continuously until the 1950s road-building replaced it with the Sichuan-Tibet highway.
- Site withinJokhang Temple, Lhasa
Jokhang is one of the great monasteries of greater Lhasa — the political and religious capital of Tibet from Songtsen Gampo's 7th-century reign to the Chinese annexation of 1950. Lhasa carries the Potala, the Jokhang and the three great Gelug seats (Drepung, Sera, Ganden) in its immediate landscape.
- Site withinDrepung Monastery, Lhasa
Drepung is one of the great monasteries of greater Lhasa — the political and religious capital of Tibet from Songtsen Gampo's 7th-century reign to the Chinese annexation of 1950. Lhasa carries the Potala, the Jokhang and the three great Gelug seats (Drepung, Sera, Ganden) in its immediate landscape.
- Site withinSera Monastery, Lhasa
Sera is one of the great monasteries of greater Lhasa — the political and religious capital of Tibet from Songtsen Gampo's 7th-century reign to the Chinese annexation of 1950. Lhasa carries the Potala, the Jokhang and the three great Gelug seats (Drepung, Sera, Ganden) in its immediate landscape.
- Site withinGanden Monastery, Lhasa
Ganden is one of the great monasteries of greater Lhasa — the political and religious capital of Tibet from Songtsen Gampo's 7th-century reign to the Chinese annexation of 1950. Lhasa carries the Potala, the Jokhang and the three great Gelug seats (Drepung, Sera, Ganden) in its immediate landscape.
- Site adjacencySamye Monastery
Samye monastery sits in Lhoka prefecture about 150 km southeast of Lhasa on the Yarlung Tsangpo — within the Yarlung valley heartland of pre-imperial Tibet. The Lhasa-Samye road is the oldest motorable Tibetan pilgrim route; the ferry across the Tsangpo at Samye was replaced by a bridge in the 1990s.
- Life routeAtiśa Dīpaṃkara
Atiśa Dīpaṃkara spent his last 13 years in Tibet (1042-1054), travelling from Guge through Purang to central Tibet and settling at Nyethang near Lhasa. He wrote the Bodhipathapradīpa ('Lamp for the Path to Awakening') there, founded the Kadam school with his disciple Dromtön, and died at Nyethang in 1054. His ashes were brought back to India in 1978 and interred at Dharmarajika in Dhaka.
- Site withinPotala Palace, Lhasa
The Potala Palace sits on the Marpori ('Red Hill') in central Lhasa, 2 km north-west of the Jokhang Temple. Built from 1645 by the Great Fifth Dalai Lama on the site of Songtsen Gampo's 7th-century palace, it was the Dalai Lama's winter residence and the seat of the Ganden Phodrang government until 1959, and the city's defining landmark since.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Lhasa”. The Janamsākhī tradition; W.H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (1968).
Open Lhasa in the repository →