20250921 Sunday, September 21, 2025 Lhasa Jokhang Temple and Temple Square

20250921 Sunday, September 21, 2025 Lhasa Jokhang Temple and Temple Square

While we acclimatize to the 11,900+ foot altitude, our guides are limiting our activities somewhat and giving us more time to acclimatize before we attempt to visit the Potala Palace, which is what everyone envisions when they hear of visiting Tibet.  There are 400 steps up to the palace, which is 13 floors, but at this altitude, it is anticipated that most non-acclimatized tourists will be able to make it beyond the base of the palace.

At breakfast in the St. Regis, quite a few people complained of a restless night, and two Viking clients even had to take advantage of the physician’s in-house services.  Everyone in our group was feeling well enough to do today’s tour, but at least one person in a different group was sitting the day out.  
Our destination today was the Jokhang Temple, which is not far from the hotel.  The weather started off with partial cloud cover and a temperature in the 50s, but it didn’t take long for the sun to burn away the clouds and rapidly bring the temperature into the 70s.  There was also a 30% chance of rain today, but we were fortunate in that this didn’t happen while we were on our morning tour.

The Jokhang Temple is the most sacred site in Tibetan Buddhism.  It is surrounded by a security zone.  Anyone entering must go through security screening and have an admission ticket.  There is a large plaza in front of the Temple, and around the temple is a perimeter of shops, restaurants, and other buildings.  Surrounding the Temple proper is a circular avenue paved in cobblestones that Buddhist pilgrims follow in a clockwise procession.  Many spend hours, while some of the most devoted spend days in this procession.

The most devoted prostrate themselves as part of this pilgrimage.  They come prepared with folding mats, prayer skirts and aprons, hand and knee pads.  They not only kneel down, but thrust their entire bodies forward until completely flat on the ground, then clap their hands in front of them, stand back up, and repeat the process.  There is a large area directly in front of the Temple where devotees prostrate themselves in fixed positions.  Around the temple, many prostrate themselves every few minutes or steps, while the most devoted make their way around the temple literally one body length at a time.

  
It took some waiting to get into the very crowded temple.  The only other place that can compare for crowds is the Vatican in Rome.  When you see pictures of monks in their crimson robes, you could never imagine them forming an assault stack like the Peace Keepers on January 6th, but that’s what one group of very aggressive monks did, shoving our entire tour group aside as they barged their way through the crowd.  Our guide said they were not local monks, but from a distant monastery visiting.  They carried with them a 10-gallon steel barrel of some sort of offering slung from a pole borne by 4 of the men.

Traffic inside the temple was very chaotic, with lots of pushing, shoving, and people moving in both directions simultaneously through very narrow doorways.  There are lots of lit candles inside and many people with flowing robes.  It’s a wonder that the temple hasn’t burned down in the nearly 2,000 years it has stood.  If someone caught fire, there was no way they could stop, drop, and roll.

There was no photography allowed inside the temple.  The most precious item in the temple is a gold leaf-covered carving of the original Buddha at age 12, carved by Buddha himself.  We could only catch glimpses of it within a tiny case in which there were two monks applying gold leaf to the Buddha, but partially blocking the view.  

People were making all sorts of offerings to the many Buddha statues and shrines inside the temple.  A lot of people were carrying around tubs of butter, which apparently is used for many of the offering candles in the side chapels. 

One of the more impressive artifacts was a golden depiction of heaven as a huge mountain-like temple with giant golden steps protected by dragons on all sides, and with ladders strategically placed on some of the huge steps. Around the periphery was depicted a circle of literal hell, with humans being impaled, skinned alive, devoured by animals, and any other imaginable torture you could think of.  This very impressive work was said to have cost millions of US dollars and was completed in the last 20 years.  

It was actually a relief to escape out the roof of the temple and then down some very steep submarine-like stairs back to the outside of the temple.  We had an hour of free time to join the procession around the temple and check out the shops and restaurants.  

The most unusual shop Ben found was a pair of dentistry shops where you could go to have your teeth pulled and dentures fitted.  Most of the shops sold Buddhist prayer-related items like prayer beads, clothing, prayer wheels, although there were plenty of shops selling just about anything else to tourists.  Ben had hoped to find a fitting that would allow two nasal cannulas to be simultaneously attached to the oxygen generators in our rooms, but the only response he got was “No, have”.  

After our tour of the temple, we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch.  The quality of the food was better than the last lunch restaurant we ate at in Chengdu.  It was also served family-style but with plates to be shared by only 4 people on a table because there we were seated on long, narrow rectangular tables.  They still had to be prompted multiple times to provide serving utensils.

When we got back to our hotel, we got our passports back and took naps. Ben had discovered that the housekeeping staff had given us two more nasal cannulas, so he was able to engineer them into a splitter and extender, so now we can both share oxygen in the bed and Ben has enough length of hose to reach the desk as well.  

High altitude sickness is caused by inflammation caused by acute hypoxia or lack of oxygen in certain tissues. This is different from the shortness of breath with exertion that comes with a lower oxygen concentration in the air. So supplemental oxygen plays a role in decreasing the acute inflammation.  So far, we have been managing OK, aside from a little dizziness with exertion like walking faster and further than we should.  Over days or weeks, the body would produce more red blood cells to compensate for the lower oxygen concentration.  This is how the Sherpas seem to have superhuman strength and endurance while sea level dwellers struggle just to get their shoes on without becoming short of breath at these altitudes.

In the evening, we boarded buses and headed to the Lhasa Tsedang Hotel, where we had dinner and a cultural show.  This was all held in a hotel conference room with a small stage at one end and a buffet line in an adjacent lobby.  The buffet featured some Tibetan dishes, including a blood sausage, sheep’s lungs, and stir-fried mutton.  There were also some salads, rice, beef and peppers, pork with wood ear and lettuce, Chinese broccoli, western steamed broccoli, spaghetti, and egg drop soup.  The quality of the food was good.  

Both the blood sausage and sheep’s lungs were not as strange or gamey as I would have imagined.  The blood sausage was made with barley, and the sheep’s lungs were stir-fried with onions and peppers and tasted like a chewy and slightly crunchy tofu.  

The dinner show was fairly low-key.  These were not professional entertainers, but more hobby and amateur cultural enthusiast hotel employees with community theater-level costumes, make-up, and stage works.  They opened with a folk opera dance and had a couple of vocal solos and other folk dances that seemed to have a slight Western cowboy spin on them.  The second-to-last act was some dancers and a crazy Yak, who ended up getting milked on stage and then worked its way through the audience.  The finale was our Viking Guides getting up on stage and doing some dancing and singing with some of the guests.  It was a fun evening with a decent meal.  

We retired back to the hotel about 8 p.m.  We start our attempt to climb the Potala Palace tomorrow at 9 a.m.  

The Great Firewall of China extends well into Tibet.  Not only does it block access to most US-based internet company services like Google, YouTube, Blogger, and many others, but China also makes it so that any hotel Wi-Fi is not allowed to connect to any device with a VPN installed.  And even with an eSIM with direct cellular data that seems to work with a VPN under most circumstances, there is just enough interference to make posting any images to Blogger impractical.  The Chinese expect everyone to use WeChat and TikTok, and nothing else, I suppose.  So this blog may look pretty boring without photos for a while until we get back to the USA and can upload the images to Blogger.