"The buildings are eight hundred years old. The prayers are older. They have survived everything that has happened to this country, and they are still here."
Zongskya monastery was founded in the 13th century, in the dying years of the Yuan dynasty, in a valley so remote that even the imperial tax collectors rarely made the journey. The founders were a small group of monks from central Tibet, fleeing what they saw as the corruption of the larger monasteries to the west.
They built with what they had: local stone, local timber, and the labor of their own hands. The main temple sits on a south-facing slope, oriented to catch the morning sun even in midwinter. Around it, smaller chapels, the monks' quarters, and a small library that once held several thousand volumes of Buddhist scripture — most of which were lost in the 20th century.
The long century
The 1900s were not kind to Zongskya, or to most Tibetan monasteries. The disruptions of Republican-era warlord rule, the long freeze of the mid-century, the Cultural Revolution, the reopening — each of these touched the monastery directly. Monks were sent away. Buildings were damaged. Many of the original artifacts are gone, sold or destroyed in the years when survival mattered more than preservation.
What remained was a small community of older monks who kept the prayers alive in memory, and a few younger men who returned in the 1980s and 1990s to begin the slow work of rebuilding. Today, Zongskya is home to about forty monks — young and old, with a small school for novices.
A library reborn
The library is the heart of Zongskya, and the reason it matters beyond the immediate region. The monks have spent the last fifteen years reconstructing their collection, block by block, with help from monasteries in Lhasa, Dharamsala, and abroad. The work is painstaking: identifying what was lost, locating copies, restoring the original woodblocks where possible, reprinting what was destroyed.
It will take another generation to complete. The current abbot, a man in his seventies who has been here since before the reopening, talks about it the way other people talk about planting trees they will never sit under.
The morning I spent there
I went to Zongskya for the first time in early spring 2026, walked up the valley with two of the younger monks, and arrived in time for the evening prayers. The temple was cold — much colder than the rest of the valley — and the butter lamps gave off a thin, fragrant smoke. The chanting was the kind of sound that you stop trying to parse after a few minutes, and start to feel in your chest.
An older monk, noticing that I was a stranger, came over and asked, in slow Mandarin, if I had questions. I asked him what he thought the future of Zongskya was. He thought for a long time.
"The future of Zongskya is the future of the young men here. If they stay, the monastery continues. If they leave, we will keep the prayers going as long as we can, and then we will let the buildings return to the stone they came from. But I think they will stay. I think this place has a way of holding on to people."
I hope he's right.