Ramoche Travel Video Guide

Ramoche Travel Itinerary

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A visit to the three-storey, robust Ramoche (9am-noon; Y20, plus up to Y50 per chapel for photographs), a short walk north of the Barkhor, on Ramoche Lu between Beijing Dong Lu and Lingkor Bei Lu, is essentially an expensive trip to a building site. Second only in importance to the Jokhang, the building is currently undergoing major renovations, and many statues and altars have been shifted around and draped with huge polythene sheets to protect the treasures. It will be glorious when complete but the date of this is uncertain.

The Ramoche was built in the seventh century by Songtsen Gampo's Chinese wife, Princess Wencheng, to house the Jowo Sakyamuni statue that she brought to Tibet. This statue later ended up in the Jokhang and was replaced by the Akshobhya Buddha, a representation of Sakyamuni at the age of eight. This much revered statue was broken in two in the Cultural Revolution, with one part taken to China and narrowly saved from being melted down, while the other was later discovered on a factory scrap heap in Tibet. However, it's fairly unlikely that the statue in position today in the main shrine, the Tsangkhang at the back of the

temple, is the original.

While you're in the area, call in on the tiny Tsepak Lakhang to the south of Ramoche. The little entrance is just beside a huge incense burner and you pass along a small alley lined with a row of prayer wheels. There are two small chapels in this hugely popular temple and the 55 friendly monks in residence chant their daily prayers around noon. You can walk the small circuit around the walls of Tsepak Lakhang, where the murals have been newly painted.

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