With travel in lockdown due to the pandemic I've had the chance to go
back through some of my older films and in 2018 I fulfilled a lifetime ambition
and made it to Lhasa. Now, at the time I was still a practicing lawyer so the
video that I took was only ever a family video if you like, in fact I took more
photographs, However now that I have a channel I'd really like to get the
images out there. My wife Serena practises Buddhism so
she also provides some very useful explanation. The place is literally
breathtaking and I mean that because you'll hear a lot of heavy breathing -
there is very little oxygen! enjoy!
So this is what Friday night is like in
Lhasa - everyone doing the Barkhor circuit.
So it's a beautiful balmy evening here just near the Jokhang Temple. This is the Barkhor where people
do their circumambulating
There are hundreds of people - they've got their mala beads and they're saying mantras. it's a beautiful thing to watch.
This is how the truly devout do the Barkhor circuit
all the way to the Jokhang temple
This morning we've come to the Drepung Monastery high on the hillside above
Lhasa to the north founded in the 15th century by a disciple of Tsongkhapa. At one
time i had well about five thousand monks here now there are closer to 400.
It's quite a contrast between the old monastery city here on the hillside and
then down in the valley you can see the new Western very Chinese suburbs of Lhasa
We've now come to the second principal monastery of Lhasa and that is the
Sera monastery Again, there used to be thousands of monks here,
now only about 400 or so.
The people here are queuing for hours around all the temples to get to a
particular place where there's an offering very special for today. We
managed to push all the way through with permission, and also took part in the scrum
at the very end
So what was going on there then? There's a question-and-answer session going on.
The people asking the question, the monks asking questions they would have
memorized the question. the monks sitting have also memorized the answers ,supposedly, so
what's happening is they get asked the question and the monks sitting must answer
the question. If he answers correctly then it's all good but if he doesn't he gets a crack - Oh
that's what it was! This is called debating and
this is how the monks memorize the information that they need to learn.
Hey what's happening today Jonathan? Well we have the Jokhang temple the most
important temple in the whole of Tibet and then we have the Potala Palace the former
residence of the Dalai Lama's. A fantastic day ahead, let's go!
Serena's making her first purchase of the day...
and we are in front of the magnificent Potala Palace. I've waited to see
this for so many years and it does not disappoint - it's enormous!
You can only imagine what it was like back in the days when Tibet was forbidden and only one
or two foreigners, some British managed to get all the way here and they saw this.
Yeshe is saying that from here you see all the way across to the old city to the Jokhang
We've made it!
For many centuries the Dalai Lamas would watch the festivals from here. All gone now...
Well that was amazing
We're now coming out on the north side. Yeshe was just saying before 1959
there was nothing on this side nothing at all.
What you can here at the moment is the dancers, and they're doing an opera as well but it's not
like any opera I've ever seen before and this is part of the Sho Dun festival
which means the yogurt festival
Right ,now the most important temple of them all - the Jokhang temple
It's our final afternoon in Lhasa and we've come to the summer palace, the summer
residence of the Dalai Lamas.