Gyantse

Gyantse grew where the Nyang Chu valley opens out, on a route linking central Tibet with the Chumbi valley, Sikkim and the plains of India. A local dynasty descended from the Sakya-era nobility built the fort on the rock in the 14th century, and their descendants founded Palcho Monastery in the 15th, adding the Kumbum, whose chapels were painted by artists working in a style that fused Tibetan with Nepalese and Chinese models. The monastery unusually housed colleges of more than one Buddhist school within a single wall.

Wool and trade carried the town through the following centuries. Gyantse was the third town of Tibet after Lhasa and Shigatse, a market where the wool of the northern grasslands was gathered for export south, and its weavers gave their name to a tradition of Tibetan carpet making. In 1904 a British expedition under Francis Younghusband fought its way up the valley; Tibetan defenders held the dzong through a siege before it fell, and the convention that followed gave Britain the right to station a trade agent in the town.

The 20th century took away most of what had made the place prosperous. The southern trade collapsed when the border with India closed after 1959, the monastery, the fort and the Kumbum were ransacked in the Cultural Revolution, and a flood nearly destroyed the town in 1954. Restoration since the 1980s has repaired the Kumbum and parts of the fort, and the old quarter has kept much of its traditional street pattern, while a new administrative town has grown up to the south.

Gyantse's identity rests on its monastery and its craft. The Kumbum's painted chapels are the reason art historians come to a town of this size, and the style of image-making associated with 15th-century Gyantse is studied as a distinct school. Carpet weaving is the town's other old trade: Tibetan carpets knotted in a technique using a rod to form the pile were made here for monastery seats, saddles and beds, and weaving still goes on in the valley.

Religious life follows the ordinary rhythms of Tsang. People circle the monastery wall clockwise in the morning, refill butter lamps before festivals, and hang new prayer flags on the rooftops at Losar. The horse and archery festival, held on the meadows below the fort in the fourth Tibetan month, brings riders and archers from the surrounding farming villages, and families pitch tents and picnic for days. The fort's own history is commemorated in the town as a story of resistance.

Manners follow Tibetan custom: white khata scarves are exchanged at arrivals and departures, tea is topped up after every sip, and guests are pressed to eat more than they intend. Tibetan is the language of the lanes, fields and market, Mandarin that of offices and schools, and most working-age residents move between the two.

Gyantse is a county seat of around eight thousand people, with a further tens of thousands in the villages of the county around it. It feels like what it is: a farming town where tractors and motorbikes outnumber cars in the old lanes, dogs sleep in the sun and shopkeepers sit outside. Most families are Tibetan, with a smaller Han and Hui population running shops, restaurants and building work along the newer street.

Barley is the backbone of the valley, with wheat, rapeseed, peas and potatoes in the irrigated fields and yaks, sheep and goats on the slopes above. Threshing in late summer is a communal business, with grain spread on rooftops and courtyards. Beyond farming, work means government offices, road building, small workshops, carpet weaving and the tourist traffic that passes through between Lhasa and Shigatse.

The day is shaped by the sun. Work begins early while the air is cold and still, the middle of the day is bright and hot in the thin atmosphere, and the streets empty soon after dark, especially in winter. Ongoing changes are the same as elsewhere on the plateau: new housing on the edges of town, better roads, more domestic tourism, young people leaving for jobs in Lhasa or beyond, and the balance between conserving the old quarter and rebuilding it.

Gyantse eats what the valley grows. Barley is roasted and ground into tsampa, mixed by hand with butter tea into a dough and eaten at breakfast or carried into the fields. Po cha, butter tea, is churned from brick tea, salt and yak butter and poured all day; sweet milk tea has become the everyday alternative in teahouses. Momos, dumplings steamed or fried with yak meat or vegetables, and thukpa, a noodle soup, are the standard meals, with shapale, a fried meat pastry, as the usual snack.

Dairy and meat come from the herds. Yak meat is eaten fresh in stews with radish and potato, or dried in strips through the winter until it is hard and salty; milk becomes yoghurt, soft cheese and chura, dried cubes chewed slowly for hours. Chang, a cloudy beer brewed at home from barley, is poured at weddings, festivals and the horse fair, and refused only with difficulty.

Vegetables were historically scarce at this altitude, and potatoes, radishes and cabbage still dominate, although greenhouses along the valley now supply green vegetables for much of the year. The other half of the town's eating is migrant cooking: Sichuanese restaurants with their stir-fries and hotpot, and Hui noodle counters pulling lamian to order in clear beef broth. Visitors' menus add fried rice, egg dishes and, near the monastery, a little Nepalese-influenced food.