Shigatse

Shigatse grew up in the valley of Tsang, the province west of Lhasa, at a meeting of routes that carried barley, salt, wool and tea between the plateau, the Nepalese passes and the trade towns of the south. The founding event was the building of Tashilhunpo in 1447 by Gendun Drup, a disciple of Tsongkhapa later counted as the First Dalai Lama. The monastery became the largest Gelug foundation in Tsang and drew scholars, craftsmen and traders to the settlement below it.

In the late 16th century the rulers known as the Tsangpa made Shigatse their capital, and in the early 17th century Karma Phuntsok Namgyal raised a fortress on the ridge above the town. Their defeat in 1642, when the Mongol Güshi Khan installed the Fifth Dalai Lama's government in Lhasa, ended Tsang's independent power, but the city kept a second kind of authority: the Fourth Panchen Lama, abbot of Tashilhunpo, was recognised as a line of reincarnations, and his successors held Tashilhunpo and much of the surrounding district. The monastery's own estate made Shigatse a centre of wealth and learning, and European travellers, including the Scottish envoy George Bogle in 1774, came to the Panchen's court rather than to Lhasa.

The 20th century was hard on the city. The dzong was demolished in 1961, after the 1959 uprising, and Tashilhunpo, though damaged, escaped the worst of the destruction that struck most Tibetan monasteries. The succession of the Panchen Lama has been disputed since 1995: the boy recognised by the Dalai Lama has not been seen in public since that year, and the government named its own candidate. Since the 1990s the old quarter has been ringed by a far larger modern city, and the fortress was rebuilt on its rock in the 2000s.

Shigatse's public life turns on Tashilhunpo. Pilgrims arrive from the villages of Tsang and from much further away, walk the kora clockwise around the monastery walls, spin the long ranks of prayer wheels and pour butter into the lamps in the chapels; some measure the circuit in full-body prostrations. Monks study, debate in the courtyards and prepare the ceremonies that mark the Tibetan lunar calendar, and the giant appliqué thangkas hung from the monastery's stone terrace in summer draw the biggest crowds of the year.

The city is the cultural capital of Tsang, a province with its own dialect, dress and farming traditions, and Shigatse people are recognised elsewhere in Tibet by their speech. Local crafts include carpet and cloth weaving, metalwork for monastery fittings, and the carving of mani stones. Tibetan opera, Lhamo, is performed at festivals, and songs sung while threshing or building are still part of village work in the valleys nearby.

Daily courtesies are shared with the rest of Tibet: white khata scarves offered on arrival and departure, tea cups refilled after every sip, and a general reserve towards strangers that gives way quickly over a thermos of butter tea. Mandarin is the language of offices, schools and much of the new town, and Tibetan of homes, markets and the monastery, so many residents move between the two through the day.

Roughly 120,000 people live in the urban district, within a prefecture-level city of about 800,000 spread over an enormous area of farmland, grazing country and mountain. The population mixes Tibetan families, many with roots in the surrounding farming villages, with Han and Hui migrants who run shops, restaurants and building firms, most of whom arrived after the highways and the railway improved.

Barley is the anchor of the rural economy around the city, along with wheat, rapeseed, potatoes and herds of yaks and sheep on the higher ground. In the city itself the work is government administration, construction, trade, transport along the Nepal highway, and tourism, which is overwhelmingly domestic and concentrated in the warmer months.

The day starts early, with tea and tsampa and a circuit of the kora for older residents before shops open, and ends early too: the streets empty after dark in winter. Power, water and internet reach the new town well and the outlying villages unevenly. Current issues are those of the region as a whole — the pace of migration and construction, the cost of housing in the new districts, the future of grazing land, and the resettlement of herders into permanent villages.

Everyday eating in Shigatse is Tibetan and built for the altitude. Tsampa, roasted barley flour, is kneaded by hand with butter tea into a dough and eaten at breakfast and as a portable meal. Po cha, butter tea, is churned from brick tea, salt and yak butter and drunk through the day; sweet milk tea, sold by the thermos in teahouses, is the modern rival. Yak meat appears fresh in stews, dried in strips hung up through the winter, and minced into momos, the steamed or fried dumplings sold everywhere. Thukpa, a noodle soup with meat and vegetables, is the standard hot meal, and shapale, a fried meat pastry, the standard snack.

Dairy carries much of the diet. Yak and dri milk is made into yoghurt, into soft fresh cheese and into chura, hard cubes dried until they must be chewed for a long time. Barley also becomes chang, a cloudy home-brewed beer poured at festivals and weddings, while bottled Lhasa Beer stands in for it in restaurants. Vegetables are limited by the climate, so potatoes, radishes, cabbage and greenhouse produce from lower valleys do most of the work.

The other half of the city's food is migrant. Sichuanese kitchens serve stir-fried dishes and hotpot to office workers; Hui and Gansu cooks pull lamian beef noodles and bake flatbread; and the market sells dried fruit, nuts and tea from the trade routes that made the town. Restaurant menus in the tourist quarter combine all three, with Nepalese and Indian dishes added for visitors heading towards the border.