GEEO Tibet Google Earth Presentation

USA

Today, I’d like to share a great experience I had while traveling to Asia through a non-profit organization called GEEO. GEEO helps educators travel abroad so that they can learn more about different cultures to share with their students. I was joined on my trip by educators and retired teachers from all around the United States.

Asia

This journey takes place in Asia, Earth’s largest continent. A continent is one of the planet’s great landmasses, and Asia is the giant among them: it covers about 30% of all the land on Earth and is home to roughly 60% of all the people—more than 4.5 billion. The route crosses the heart of the continent, reaching the Tibetan Plateau and the tallest mountain range in the world.

China

China is one of the most populous countries on Earth, with about 1.4 billion people—roughly one out of every six people on the planet. China was the world’s most populous country until India moved into first place in the 2020s.

China is also physically enormous. It’s a little bigger than the United States in land area, and its landscapes range from deserts and grasslands to some of the highest mountains anywhere.

China is home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, with thousands of years of recorded history. Powerful ruling families called dynasties shaped Chinese culture over the centuries. Dynasties like the Qin, Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing gave China much of its language, art, and architecture. Chinese inventions changed the entire world: paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass all came from China.

Today, China is one of the most influential countries in the world and has the second-largest economy after the United States. Its government is led by the Chinese Communist Party, which has been in power since 1949.

Chengdu

Chengdu (pronunciation) is the capital of Sichuan (pronunciation) Province in southwestern China. With more than 20 million people in its wider metropolitan area, Chengdu is one of China’s largest cities. (A metropolitan area is a major city plus its suburbs and nearby cities and towns. [Can you use your city or a nearby city as an example?])

Sichuan is known around the world for its food—especially the Sichuan peppercorn, which creates a tingling, numbing feeling on your tongue. The Chinese call this combination of numbing and spicy málà. In fact, the United Nations named Chengdu a “City of Gastronomy” for its cooking. The city’s most famous meal is Sichuan hotpot: a pot of bubbling broth sits in the middle of the table, and everyone cooks vegetables, tofu, noodles, and thin slices of meat right there, then dips them in sauce.

But Chengdu is perhaps best known for something else: it’s home to China’s beloved national symbol, the giant panda.

Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding

One highlight of the Chengdu area is the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, one of the world’s leading centers for raising and protecting giant pandas. Founded in 1987, the base lets scientists care for pandas of every age—from tiny newborn cubs to full-grown adults—in enclosures built to feel like the bamboo forests where pandas live naturally.

Giant pandas are found in the wild only in the mountains of Sichuan and a few neighboring provinces, and there are fewer than 2,000 of them left there. A newborn panda cub is astonishingly tiny—pink, blind, and only about the size of a stick of butter—which is one reason pandas are so hard to raise. For a long time the giant panda was classified as endangered, meaning a species at serious risk of dying out completely. Thanks to decades of conservation work—protecting habitat, breeding pandas, and creating dozens of nature reserves—the giant panda was moved in 2016 to the less-severe category of “vulnerable.” It is one of the world’s great conservation success stories, and Chengdu has been at the center of it.

The base is also home to red pandas—small, reddish, raccoon-like animals with long, bushy, ringed tails. Despite the name, red pandas are not closely related to giant pandas at all; they belong to their own separate animal family and are actually closer cousins to weasels and raccoons.

Leshan Giant Buddha

Near Chengdu is the tallest stone Buddha statue in the world, the Leshan (pronunciation) Giant Buddha. Carved directly into a red sandstone cliff, the seated Buddha stands 233 feet tall—taller than a 20-story building. Its shoulders are nearly 100 feet wide, and a single one of its toes is big enough for a person to sit on comfortably.

Work on the statue began in the year 713, during the Tang Dynasty, and took about 90 years to finish. It was the idea of a Buddhist monk named Haitong, who hoped that carving a giant Buddha above the river would calm the dangerous, swirling currents where three rivers—the Min, the Dadu, and the Qingyi—crash together. It partly worked. So much rock was cut away and dumped into the water during construction that the currents really did change, making the river safer for boats.

The Buddha also uses an interesting innovation in engineering. A system of drainage channels is carved into the hair, collar, arms, and back of the statue, quietly carrying rainwater away. That hidden plumbing has helped protect the Buddha from erosion for more than 1,200 years. The Leshan Giant Buddha is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Do you know what a UNESCO World Heritage Site is? It is a landmark or area recognized by UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—for having exceptional cultural or natural importance and being worth protecting for future generations.

Mount Emei

Right beside the Leshan Buddha rises Mount Emei (pronunciation), or Emei Shan (shan means “mountain” in Chinese), also part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. Climbing to more than 10,000 feet, it is one of the Four Sacred Mountains of Chinese Buddhism, and people have made pilgrimages here for nearly 2,000 years. The mountain is dotted with ancient temples and monasteries connected by long stone stairways.

Near the base sits Wannian Temple, the “Ten-Thousand-Year Temple,” one of Emei’s oldest, famous for a huge bronze statue of Samantabhadra—a revered figure in Buddhism—seated on a white elephant. Higher up are hiking trails through misty forests and clifftop pavilions built for meditation. The mountain is also home to bands of wild macaque monkeys who are not at all shy: they’re clever, bold, and well known for snatching snacks and water bottles right out of visitors’ hands.

Tibet

In the southwestern part of China lies the vast Tibetan Plateau. It’s often called “the Roof of the World,” and for good reason: the plateau averages more than 14,000 feet above sea level—so high that the air holds far less oxygen than we’re used to, and newcomers often feel dizzy or short of breath until their bodies adjust. This adjustment is called acclimatization.

The plateau is the homeland of the Tibetan people, who have their own language, their own writing, and a culture shaped for centuries by Tibetan Buddhism—a distinctive form of the Buddhist religion. Everyday foods include tsampa (roasted barley flour), yak meat, and salty butter tea. You’ll see colorful prayer flags strung across rooftops and mountain passes; Tibetans believe the wind carries the printed prayers and blessings out into the world.

Tibet has a long and complicated history. A powerful Tibetan Empire rose here in the 600s. Over later centuries, Tibet was sometimes independent and sometimes tied to its huge neighbors, including the Mongols and the Chinese empire. In 1913, Tibet’s leader—the 13th Dalai Lama, the most important teacher in Tibetan Buddhism—declared Tibet independent, and for the next few decades Tibet governed itself. Then, in 1950–1951, the newly formed People’s Republic of China sent in its army and took control. In 1959, after a failed Tibetan uprising, the current (14th) Dalai Lama fled over the mountains to India, where he set up a Tibetan government-in-exile that still exists today. China governs the area as the “Tibet Autonomous Region.”

Tibet’s modern political history remains deeply contested. The Chinese government considers Tibet an inseparable part of China and points to centuries of political ties between Tibet and Chinese states. Many Tibetans—especially those living in exile—argue that Tibet functioned independently before Chinese forces entered in 1950 and say that Chinese rule has restricted Tibetan religion, language, and political freedoms. International human-rights organizations and United Nations experts have raised concerns about some of those restrictions. The Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration advocate a “Middle Way” that seeks greater Tibetan autonomy within the People’s Republic of China rather than full independence. Understanding Tibet means recognizing both the depth of its culture and the fact that its modern history is described very differently by the parties involved.

Lhasa

The heart of Tibet is its capital, Lhasa (pronunciation). The name means “Place of the Gods,” and for more than a thousand years, Lhasa has been the center of the Tibetan Buddhist world. Sitting at about 12,000 feet, it is one of the highest cities on Earth—higher than almost any peak in the continental United States. Because of that altitude, visitors typically spend their first day resting, letting their bodies begin acclimatizing to the thin air before doing anything active.

A gentle walk through the old city reveals the rhythm of Lhasa: fluttering prayer flags, the smell of juniper incense, spinning prayer wheels, and pilgrims from all over Tibet. Many of Lhasa’s most sacred buildings were damaged or destroyed during China’s Cultural Revolution—a turbulent period in the 1960s and 1970s when the Chinese government attacked traditional religion and culture across the country. A great many of these sites have since been repaired and reopened, beginning in the 1980s.

Jokhang Temple & the Barkhor

The spiritual heart of Lhasa—and of all Tibet—is the Jokhang (pronunciation) Temple. Founded in the 600s during the reign of King Songtsen Gampo, the temple was built to house sacred Buddha statues brought to Tibet by his two brides—Princess Wencheng from China and Princess Bhrikuti from Nepal—as part of their dowries. Its most treasured image, the Jowo, is the most revered Buddha statue in Tibet. Outside the doors, you can watch pilgrims prostrate themselves—stretching fully flat on the ground again and again as an act of devotion—some having traveled hundreds of miles to do so.

Around the temple runs the Barkhor (pronunciation), a ring of narrow streets that forms an ancient pilgrimage path. Walking a sacred loop like this, clockwise, is called a kora (pronunciation), and pilgrims have been circling the Jokhang this way for well over a thousand years. Today the Barkhor is also a bustling market, where stalls sell prayer wheels, carpets, turquoise jewelry, and yak butter.

A popular activity in Lhasa is a Tibetan cooking class, where visitors learn to make momos (pronunciation)—steamed dumplings stuffed with meat or vegetables—and then share the meal they’ve made.

Potala Palace

Towering over Lhasa on a hill called Red Hill is the Potala (pronunciation) Palace, perhaps the most iconic building in all of Tibet. Rising about 13 stories and containing more than 1,000 rooms, it served for centuries as the winter home of the Dalai Lamas and as the political and religious center of Tibet, right up until 1959.

Construction of the palace you see today began in 1645, under the “Great Fifth” Dalai Lama, and took decades to complete. It has two main parts. The White Palace held the Dalai Lama’s living quarters and the offices of government. The Red Palace, in the center, was used for religious ceremonies and holds the jewel-covered golden tombs of past Dalai Lamas. During the Cultural Revolution, when so many other sites were being destroyed, China’s Premier Zhou Enlai sent soldiers specifically to guard the Potala Palace—which is a big reason it survived. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sera Monastery

Just north of Lhasa lies the Sera (pronunciation) Monastery, founded in 1419. Every afternoon, monks in deep-red robes gather in a courtyard shaded by trees and challenge one another with questions about Buddhist philosophy. The style is dramatic: a standing monk claps his hands sharply and gestures as he fires a question, while a seated monk answers on the spot. It looks almost like a sport, but it’s actually a centuries-old way of sharpening the mind and testing how well the monks understand what they’ve studied.

Sera belongs to the Gelug (pronunciation) school, sometimes called the “Yellow Hat” school—one of the four main traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, along with the Nyingma, Kagyu, and Sakya schools. The Dalai Lama belongs to this Gelug tradition. The four schools share the same core beliefs but differ in some of their teachings, texts, and practices.

Yamdrok Lake

The roads out of Lhasa are spectacular, climbing over mountain passes more than 16,000 feet high—so high that the road itself sits above the tops of most mountains in North America. On one of those roads, the Kamba La mountain pass offers a view down at Yamdrok Lake, or Yamdrok Tso (pronunciation)—tso means “lake” in Tibetan.

Yamdrok is one of Tibet’s three great sacred lakes. It’s a long, winding ribbon of brilliant turquoise water cradled by snow-capped peaks. Tibetans hold lakes and mountains to be holy, believing them to be the homes of spirits and deities, so you’ll often see pilgrims walking a kora around the shore.

Karola Glacier

Farther along the road, the mountains close in and the Karola (pronunciation) Glacier spills down almost to the roadside—one of the few glaciers in Tibet you can see up close from a car. A glacier is a huge mass of ice, built up from centuries of packed snow, that slowly flows downhill under its own enormous weight. The Karola Glacier flows down from a sacred peak called Noijin Kangsang.

Like most glaciers around the world, the Karola Glacier is shrinking as the planet’s climate warms. Glaciers act like frozen water towers: they store water as ice in the cold months and release it slowly as they melt, feeding rivers that millions of people downstream rely on. As they shrink, that natural water supply becomes less reliable—which makes the glaciers of the Himalayas important far beyond Tibet.

Gyantse

Gyantse (pronunciation) is a town that once sat on a busy trade route between India and Tibet. For centuries, traders and pilgrims passed through here carrying wool, salt, and tea across the Himalayas. Gyantse was long considered Tibet’s third-most-important town, and because it hasn’t grown as fast as other cities, it has kept much of its old, small-town character.

High on a rocky hill looking down on the town is the Gyantse Dzong, one of the best-preserved fortresses in Tibet (dzong means “fortress”). It’s remembered for a dark chapter in 1904, when a British military expedition marched into Tibet from India and fought its way past Gyantse toward Lhasa. Tibetan defenders, armed mostly with old weapons, suffered terrible losses against modern British rifles. Britain wanted to open Tibet to trade and to block the influence of rival empires, drawing even this remote mountain kingdom into the global power struggles of the era.

Pelkor Chöde & the Kumbum

Gyantse’s greatest treasure is the Pelkor Chöde (pronunciation) Monastery and, beside it, the remarkable Gyantse Kumbum (pronunciation). The Kumbum, built around 1427, is a giant chörten—the Tibetan word for a stupa, a dome-shaped Buddhist monument that often contains sacred relics. It rises in nine tiers like a tiered wedding cake, topped by a golden dome and a pair of painted eyes, and inside it contains a maze of tiny chapels—so many that the word kumbum literally means “100,000 images,” a nod to the countless painted and sculpted Buddhas, saints, and protectors packed within.

Pelkor Chöde was shared, at different times, by monks from several different schools of Tibetan Buddhism—a rare example of the traditions living side by side under one roof.

Shigatse

Shigatse (pronunciation), Tibet’s second-largest city, lies farther along the road. Compared with historic Gyantse, Shigatse feels modern and busy, with wide streets and plenty of traffic. Visitors come to see one of the most important monasteries in all of Tibet, which sits on the western edge of town.

Tashilhunpo Monastery

Tashilhunpo (pronunciation) Monastery, founded in 1447, is the traditional home of the Panchen (pronunciation) Lama—recognized in Tibetan Buddhism as the second-most-important spiritual leader after the Dalai Lama. This huge complex is visited daily by hundreds of pilgrims. Many carry yak butter to refill the temple’s flickering lamps as they walk the kora around the monastery, past a chapel that houses an enormous gilded statue of the Maitreya, the “Future Buddha”—at roughly 85 feet tall, one of the largest statues of its kind in the world.

The Panchen Lama is also at the center of a serious modern controversy. In 1995, the Dalai Lama recognized a six-year-old boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th Panchen Lama. Soon afterward, the boy and his family disappeared from public view and have not been seen publicly since. United Nations human-rights experts continue to describe his case as an enforced disappearance and have asked China to allow independent verification of his whereabouts and well-being; Chinese authorities have said that he is living a normal life and does not wish to be disturbed. Chinese authorities approved a different boy, Gyaincain Norbu, as the 11th Panchen Lama. Because the Panchen Lama traditionally plays an important role in recognizing the next Dalai Lama, the dispute is tied to the larger question of who will have authority over the future leadership of Tibetan Buddhism.

Sakya Monastery

Farther west lies the town of Sakya (pronunciation) and its great monastery, which gives its name to one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The monastery looks like a massive, gray fortress with thick defensive walls surrounding a courtyard. Inside, it holds an astonishing library—towering shelves stacked with thousands of ancient scriptures, some of them centuries old.

Sakya was once the most powerful place in Tibet. In the 1200s, the Mongols—the same people who, under Genghis Khan and his descendants, built the largest land empire in history—swept across Asia. Rather than simply conquering Tibet, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan formed a special partnership with the head of Sakya, a brilliant scholar-monk named Phagpa (pronunciation). Kublai Khan made Phagpa his religious teacher, and in return the Sakya lamas were given authority to govern Tibet on the Mongols’ behalf. For about a century, Tibet was ruled from Sakya.

Rongbuk Monastery

Beyond the last towns, the road climbs deep into the Himalayas. On the way stands Rongbuk (pronunciation) Monastery, the highest monastery in the world, perched at about 16,340 feet. Founded around the year 1900 by a Nyingma lama, it’s a small, remote, windswept community of monks and nuns.

What draws visitors here, though, is the view. Stand at Rongbuk on a clear day, look south, and Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, fills the sky at the end of the valley—a giant white pyramid rising above everything around it. A white chörten in the foreground and the mountain behind make one of the most famous scenes in the Himalayas.

Everest Base Camp

Just a few miles beyond the monastery lies Everest Base Camp on the Tibetan (north) side of the mountain, at around 16,900 feet. This is the staging area where mountaineers gather before attempting to climb the world’s tallest peak. Climbers usually spend days—sometimes weeks—resting here to let their bodies get used to the altitude, because rushing up too fast can cause dangerous altitude sickness, when the body struggles to cope with the low oxygen high in the mountains.

Base Camp sits at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier, a river of ice that climbers cross on their long, dangerous route toward the summit. Visitors who aren’t climbing often spend a night nearby in traditional tents made partly of yak hair, hoping to wake to a clear morning view of the mountain.

Mount Everest

At the head of the valley stands Mount Everest at 8,848.86 meters (29,031.7 feet) above sea level. That precise height was announced jointly by China and Nepal in December 2020, after surveyors from both countries carefully re-measured the peak—which straddles the border between the two nations.

Everest has more than one name. Tibetans call it Chomolungma (pronunciation), meaning roughly “Goddess Mother of the World,” and in Nepal it’s known as Sagarmatha (pronunciation). Its English name honors Sir George Everest, a British official who led a survey of India in the 1800s; the mountain was named after him by his successor, and the name was officially adopted in 1865.

Everest is still growing taller. The Himalayas were created when two of Earth’s great tectonic plates—the giant slabs that make up the planet’s surface—collided. Around 40 to 50 million years ago, the plate carrying India crashed into the plate carrying Asia. Because both are thick continental rock, neither could slide under the other, so the crumpled edge was pushed skyward into the highest mountains on Earth. India is still pushing north today, which nudges Everest a little higher—only a fraction of an inch each year, but rising all the same.

For a long time, no one had ever reached the top of Everest. That changed on May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa from the Everest region of Nepal, and Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper and climber from New Zealand, became the first people known to stand on the summit. The Sherpa people, famous for their strength and skill at high altitude, remain essential to nearly every Everest expedition to this day.

Kyirong

From the high, dry, treeless plateau of Tibet, descending the other sides of the Alps leads toward Nepal. As the road drops, the barren brown landscape gives way to green hillsides, thick forests, and rushing streams. This happens because the towering Himalayas act like a wall: moist air blowing up from the Indian Ocean drops its rain on the southern slopes, leaving the Tibetan side dry and the Nepali side lush and green.

Kyirong (pronunciation) is a town that sits near the crossing into Nepal, where a bridge over a river connects the two countries. This overland route between Tibet and Nepal is often called one of the most beautiful drives in all of Asia.

Nepal

Nepal is a small country, but it is packed with some of the most extreme geography on the planet. Squeezed between giant India and China, Nepal contains eight of the world’s ten highest mountains—including Everest. In the space of just about 100 miles, the land climbs from steamy jungles, home to tigers and rhinos, all the way up to the icy summits of the Himalayas.

Nepal is the only country in the world where Hinduism is the most common religion—but Buddhism is also deeply woven into daily life, and the two often blend together at the same shrines and festivals. Nepal holds a special place in the Buddhist world for one big reason: the Buddha himself—Siddhartha Gautama, the teacher whose ideas began the religion around 2,500 years ago—was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal.

Kathmandu

Kathmandu (pronunciation) is Nepal’s capital and largest city, home to well over a million people. Sitting in a broad bowl of land called the Kathmandu Valley, the city is more than 2,000 years old and packed with temples, shrines, and history around nearly every corner.

Kathmandu knows the power of the Himalayas firsthand. On April 25, 2015, a massive earthquake—magnitude 7.8, known as the Gorkha earthquake—struck central Nepal, killing roughly 9,000 people and damaging or destroying hundreds of thousands of buildings, including many of the valley’s ancient temples. That earthquake was caused by the very same collision of tectonic plates that built the Himalayas and lifts Everest: as India grinds northward beneath Asia, the pressure sometimes releases suddenly, and the ground shakes.

Bhaktapur

Just outside Kathmandu lies Bhaktapur (pronunciation), one of the best-preserved medieval cities in all of Asia and once the capital of its own powerful kingdom. At the city’s heart is its Durbar Square—durbar means “royal court” or “palace”—a plaza ringed by old temples and palaces where the local kings once ruled. Towering nearby is the Nyatapola (pronunciation) Temple, a graceful five-story pagoda built in 1702 and one of the tallest temples in Nepal. Remarkably, its careful construction helped it survive the 2015 earthquake with little damage while newer buildings around it fell.

Swayambhunath

Back in Kathmandu, one of the most striking sights sits on a hilltop overlooking the whole valley: Swayambhunath (pronunciation), an ancient Buddhist shrine believed to be around 2,000 years old. At its center rises a great white dome topped by a golden spire, and painted on all four sides of that spire are enormous eyes—the “eyes of the Buddha”—gazing out in every direction. Visitors climb a long staircase to reach it, spinning rows of prayer wheels along the way. The site is nicknamed the “Monkey Temple” for the troops of bold monkeys that live there, considered holy.

Pashupatinath

Another temple in Kathmandu is Pashupatinath (pronunciation), the most sacred Hindu temple in Nepal. It sits along the banks of the holy Bagmati River and is dedicated to Shiva—one of the most important gods in Hinduism—in his form as Pashupati, the “Lord of Animals.” For Hindus across South Asia, this is a major pilgrimage destination.

Pashupatinath is also a place where visitors encounter Hindu funeral traditions directly. Along the riverbank are stone platforms where families cremate their loved ones—burning the body—as part of a sacred farewell connected to beliefs about the soul, death, and rebirth. Open-air cremation may be unfamiliar to some visitors, but at Pashupatinath it is a deeply meaningful religious practice that deserves the same respect as more familiar funeral traditions.

USA

Today, I’d like to share a great experience I had while traveling to Asia through a non-profit organization called GEEO. GEEO helps educators travel abroad so that they can learn more about different cultures to share with their students. I was joined on my trip by educators and retired teachers from all around the United States.

Asia

This journey takes place in Asia, Earth’s largest continent. A continent is one of the planet’s great landmasses, and Asia is the giant among them: it covers about 30% of all the land on Earth and is home to roughly 60% of all the people—more than 4.5 billion. The route crosses the heart of the continent, reaching the Tibetan Plateau and the tallest mountain range in the world.

China

China is one of the most populous countries on Earth, with about 1.4 billion people—roughly one out of every six people on the planet. China was the world’s most populous country until India moved into first place in the 2020s.

China is also physically enormous. It’s a little bigger than the United States in land area, and its landscapes range from deserts and grasslands to some of the highest mountains anywhere.

China is home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, with thousands of years of recorded history. Powerful ruling families called dynasties shaped Chinese culture over the centuries. Dynasties like the Qin, Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing gave China much of its language, art, and architecture. Chinese inventions changed the entire world: paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass all came from China.

Today, China is one of the most influential countries in the world and has the second-largest economy after the United States. Its government is led by the Chinese Communist Party, which has been in power since 1949.

Chengdu

Chengdu (pronunciation) is the capital of Sichuan (pronunciation) Province in southwestern China. With more than 20 million people in its wider metropolitan area, Chengdu is one of China’s largest cities. (A metropolitan area is a major city plus its suburbs and nearby cities and towns. [Can you use your city or a nearby city as an example?])

Sichuan is known around the world for its food—especially the Sichuan peppercorn, which creates a tingling, numbing feeling on your tongue. The Chinese call this combination of numbing and spicy málà. In fact, the United Nations named Chengdu a “City of Gastronomy” for its cooking. The city’s most famous meal is Sichuan hotpot: a pot of bubbling broth sits in the middle of the table, and everyone cooks vegetables, tofu, noodles, and thin slices of meat right there, then dips them in sauce.

But Chengdu is perhaps best known for something else: it’s home to China’s beloved national symbol, the giant panda.

Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding

One highlight of the Chengdu area is the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, one of the world’s leading centers for raising and protecting giant pandas. Founded in 1987, the base lets scientists care for pandas of every age—from tiny newborn cubs to full-grown adults—in enclosures built to feel like the bamboo forests where pandas live naturally.

Giant pandas are found in the wild only in the mountains of Sichuan and a few neighboring provinces, and there are fewer than 2,000 of them left there. A newborn panda cub is astonishingly tiny—pink, blind, and only about the size of a stick of butter—which is one reason pandas are so hard to raise. For a long time the giant panda was classified as endangered, meaning a species at serious risk of dying out completely. Thanks to decades of conservation work—protecting habitat, breeding pandas, and creating dozens of nature reserves—the giant panda was moved in 2016 to the less-severe category of “vulnerable.” It is one of the world’s great conservation success stories, and Chengdu has been at the center of it.

The base is also home to red pandas—small, reddish, raccoon-like animals with long, bushy, ringed tails. Despite the name, red pandas are not closely related to giant pandas at all; they belong to their own separate animal family and are actually closer cousins to weasels and raccoons.

Leshan Giant Buddha

Near Chengdu is the tallest stone Buddha statue in the world, the Leshan (pronunciation) Giant Buddha. Carved directly into a red sandstone cliff, the seated Buddha stands 233 feet tall—taller than a 20-story building. Its shoulders are nearly 100 feet wide, and a single one of its toes is big enough for a person to sit on comfortably.

Work on the statue began in the year 713, during the Tang Dynasty, and took about 90 years to finish. It was the idea of a Buddhist monk named Haitong, who hoped that carving a giant Buddha above the river would calm the dangerous, swirling currents where three rivers—the Min, the Dadu, and the Qingyi—crash together. It partly worked. So much rock was cut away and dumped into the water during construction that the currents really did change, making the river safer for boats.

The Buddha also uses an interesting innovation in engineering. A system of drainage channels is carved into the hair, collar, arms, and back of the statue, quietly carrying rainwater away. That hidden plumbing has helped protect the Buddha from erosion for more than 1,200 years. The Leshan Giant Buddha is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Do you know what a UNESCO World Heritage Site is? It is a landmark or area recognized by UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—for having exceptional cultural or natural importance and being worth protecting for future generations.

Mount Emei

Right beside the Leshan Buddha rises Mount Emei (pronunciation), or Emei Shan (shan means “mountain” in Chinese), also part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. Climbing to more than 10,000 feet, it is one of the Four Sacred Mountains of Chinese Buddhism, and people have made pilgrimages here for nearly 2,000 years. The mountain is dotted with ancient temples and monasteries connected by long stone stairways.

Near the base sits Wannian Temple, the “Ten-Thousand-Year Temple,” one of Emei’s oldest, famous for a huge bronze statue of Samantabhadra—a revered figure in Buddhism—seated on a white elephant. Higher up are hiking trails through misty forests and clifftop pavilions built for meditation. The mountain is also home to bands of wild macaque monkeys who are not at all shy: they’re clever, bold, and well known for snatching snacks and water bottles right out of visitors’ hands.

Tibet

In the southwestern part of China lies the vast Tibetan Plateau. It’s often called “the Roof of the World,” and for good reason: the plateau averages more than 14,000 feet above sea level—so high that the air holds far less oxygen than we’re used to, and newcomers often feel dizzy or short of breath until their bodies adjust. This adjustment is called acclimatization.

The plateau is the homeland of the Tibetan people, who have their own language, their own writing, and a culture shaped for centuries by Tibetan Buddhism—a distinctive form of the Buddhist religion. Everyday foods include tsampa (roasted barley flour), yak meat, and salty butter tea. You’ll see colorful prayer flags strung across rooftops and mountain passes; Tibetans believe the wind carries the printed prayers and blessings out into the world.

Tibet has a long and complicated history. A powerful Tibetan Empire rose here in the 600s. Over later centuries, Tibet was sometimes independent and sometimes tied to its huge neighbors, including the Mongols and the Chinese empire. In 1913, Tibet’s leader—the 13th Dalai Lama, the most important teacher in Tibetan Buddhism—declared Tibet independent, and for the next few decades Tibet governed itself. Then, in 1950–1951, the newly formed People’s Republic of China sent in its army and took control. In 1959, after a failed Tibetan uprising, the current (14th) Dalai Lama fled over the mountains to India, where he set up a Tibetan government-in-exile that still exists today. China governs the area as the “Tibet Autonomous Region.”

Tibet’s modern political history remains deeply contested. The Chinese government considers Tibet an inseparable part of China and points to centuries of political ties between Tibet and Chinese states. Many Tibetans—especially those living in exile—argue that Tibet functioned independently before Chinese forces entered in 1950 and say that Chinese rule has restricted Tibetan religion, language, and political freedoms. International human-rights organizations and United Nations experts have raised concerns about some of those restrictions. The Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration advocate a “Middle Way” that seeks greater Tibetan autonomy within the People’s Republic of China rather than full independence. Understanding Tibet means recognizing both the depth of its culture and the fact that its modern history is described very differently by the parties involved.

Lhasa

The heart of Tibet is its capital, Lhasa (pronunciation). The name means “Place of the Gods,” and for more than a thousand years, Lhasa has been the center of the Tibetan Buddhist world. Sitting at about 12,000 feet, it is one of the highest cities on Earth—higher than almost any peak in the continental United States. Because of that altitude, visitors typically spend their first day resting, letting their bodies begin acclimatizing to the thin air before doing anything active.

A gentle walk through the old city reveals the rhythm of Lhasa: fluttering prayer flags, the smell of juniper incense, spinning prayer wheels, and pilgrims from all over Tibet. Many of Lhasa’s most sacred buildings were damaged or destroyed during China’s Cultural Revolution—a turbulent period in the 1960s and 1970s when the Chinese government attacked traditional religion and culture across the country. A great many of these sites have since been repaired and reopened, beginning in the 1980s.

Jokhang Temple & the Barkhor

The spiritual heart of Lhasa—and of all Tibet—is the Jokhang (pronunciation) Temple. Founded in the 600s during the reign of King Songtsen Gampo, the temple was built to house sacred Buddha statues brought to Tibet by his two brides—Princess Wencheng from China and Princess Bhrikuti from Nepal—as part of their dowries. Its most treasured image, the Jowo, is the most revered Buddha statue in Tibet. Outside the doors, you can watch pilgrims prostrate themselves—stretching fully flat on the ground again and again as an act of devotion—some having traveled hundreds of miles to do so.

Around the temple runs the Barkhor (pronunciation), a ring of narrow streets that forms an ancient pilgrimage path. Walking a sacred loop like this, clockwise, is called a kora (pronunciation), and pilgrims have been circling the Jokhang this way for well over a thousand years. Today the Barkhor is also a bustling market, where stalls sell prayer wheels, carpets, turquoise jewelry, and yak butter.

A popular activity in Lhasa is a Tibetan cooking class, where visitors learn to make momos (pronunciation)—steamed dumplings stuffed with meat or vegetables—and then share the meal they’ve made.

Potala Palace

Towering over Lhasa on a hill called Red Hill is the Potala (pronunciation) Palace, perhaps the most iconic building in all of Tibet. Rising about 13 stories and containing more than 1,000 rooms, it served for centuries as the winter home of the Dalai Lamas and as the political and religious center of Tibet, right up until 1959.

Construction of the palace you see today began in 1645, under the “Great Fifth” Dalai Lama, and took decades to complete. It has two main parts. The White Palace held the Dalai Lama’s living quarters and the offices of government. The Red Palace, in the center, was used for religious ceremonies and holds the jewel-covered golden tombs of past Dalai Lamas. During the Cultural Revolution, when so many other sites were being destroyed, China’s Premier Zhou Enlai sent soldiers specifically to guard the Potala Palace—which is a big reason it survived. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sera Monastery

Just north of Lhasa lies the Sera (pronunciation) Monastery, founded in 1419. Every afternoon, monks in deep-red robes gather in a courtyard shaded by trees and challenge one another with questions about Buddhist philosophy. The style is dramatic: a standing monk claps his hands sharply and gestures as he fires a question, while a seated monk answers on the spot. It looks almost like a sport, but it’s actually a centuries-old way of sharpening the mind and testing how well the monks understand what they’ve studied.

Sera belongs to the Gelug (pronunciation) school, sometimes called the “Yellow Hat” school—one of the four main traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, along with the Nyingma, Kagyu, and Sakya schools. The Dalai Lama belongs to this Gelug tradition. The four schools share the same core beliefs but differ in some of their teachings, texts, and practices.

Yamdrok Lake

The roads out of Lhasa are spectacular, climbing over mountain passes more than 16,000 feet high—so high that the road itself sits above the tops of most mountains in North America. On one of those roads, the Kamba La mountain pass offers a view down at Yamdrok Lake, or Yamdrok Tso (pronunciation)—tso means “lake” in Tibetan.

Yamdrok is one of Tibet’s three great sacred lakes. It’s a long, winding ribbon of brilliant turquoise water cradled by snow-capped peaks. Tibetans hold lakes and mountains to be holy, believing them to be the homes of spirits and deities, so you’ll often see pilgrims walking a kora around the shore.

Karola Glacier

Farther along the road, the mountains close in and the Karola (pronunciation) Glacier spills down almost to the roadside—one of the few glaciers in Tibet you can see up close from a car. A glacier is a huge mass of ice, built up from centuries of packed snow, that slowly flows downhill under its own enormous weight. The Karola Glacier flows down from a sacred peak called Noijin Kangsang.

Like most glaciers around the world, the Karola Glacier is shrinking as the planet’s climate warms. Glaciers act like frozen water towers: they store water as ice in the cold months and release it slowly as they melt, feeding rivers that millions of people downstream rely on. As they shrink, that natural water supply becomes less reliable—which makes the glaciers of the Himalayas important far beyond Tibet.

Gyantse

Gyantse (pronunciation) is a town that once sat on a busy trade route between India and Tibet. For centuries, traders and pilgrims passed through here carrying wool, salt, and tea across the Himalayas. Gyantse was long considered Tibet’s third-most-important town, and because it hasn’t grown as fast as other cities, it has kept much of its old, small-town character.

High on a rocky hill looking down on the town is the Gyantse Dzong, one of the best-preserved fortresses in Tibet (dzong means “fortress”). It’s remembered for a dark chapter in 1904, when a British military expedition marched into Tibet from India and fought its way past Gyantse toward Lhasa. Tibetan defenders, armed mostly with old weapons, suffered terrible losses against modern British rifles. Britain wanted to open Tibet to trade and to block the influence of rival empires, drawing even this remote mountain kingdom into the global power struggles of the era.

Pelkor Chöde & the Kumbum

Gyantse’s greatest treasure is the Pelkor Chöde (pronunciation) Monastery and, beside it, the remarkable Gyantse Kumbum (pronunciation). The Kumbum, built around 1427, is a giant chörten—the Tibetan word for a stupa, a dome-shaped Buddhist monument that often contains sacred relics. It rises in nine tiers like a tiered wedding cake, topped by a golden dome and a pair of painted eyes, and inside it contains a maze of tiny chapels—so many that the word kumbum literally means “100,000 images,” a nod to the countless painted and sculpted Buddhas, saints, and protectors packed within.

Pelkor Chöde was shared, at different times, by monks from several different schools of Tibetan Buddhism—a rare example of the traditions living side by side under one roof.

Shigatse

Shigatse (pronunciation), Tibet’s second-largest city, lies farther along the road. Compared with historic Gyantse, Shigatse feels modern and busy, with wide streets and plenty of traffic. Visitors come to see one of the most important monasteries in all of Tibet, which sits on the western edge of town.

Tashilhunpo Monastery

Tashilhunpo (pronunciation) Monastery, founded in 1447, is the traditional home of the Panchen (pronunciation) Lama—recognized in Tibetan Buddhism as the second-most-important spiritual leader after the Dalai Lama. This huge complex is visited daily by hundreds of pilgrims. Many carry yak butter to refill the temple’s flickering lamps as they walk the kora around the monastery, past a chapel that houses an enormous gilded statue of the Maitreya, the “Future Buddha”—at roughly 85 feet tall, one of the largest statues of its kind in the world.

The Panchen Lama is also at the center of a serious modern controversy. In 1995, the Dalai Lama recognized a six-year-old boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th Panchen Lama. Soon afterward, the boy and his family disappeared from public view and have not been seen publicly since. United Nations human-rights experts continue to describe his case as an enforced disappearance and have asked China to allow independent verification of his whereabouts and well-being; Chinese authorities have said that he is living a normal life and does not wish to be disturbed. Chinese authorities approved a different boy, Gyaincain Norbu, as the 11th Panchen Lama. Because the Panchen Lama traditionally plays an important role in recognizing the next Dalai Lama, the dispute is tied to the larger question of who will have authority over the future leadership of Tibetan Buddhism.

Sakya Monastery

Farther west lies the town of Sakya (pronunciation) and its great monastery, which gives its name to one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The monastery looks like a massive, gray fortress with thick defensive walls surrounding a courtyard. Inside, it holds an astonishing library—towering shelves stacked with thousands of ancient scriptures, some of them centuries old.

Sakya was once the most powerful place in Tibet. In the 1200s, the Mongols—the same people who, under Genghis Khan and his descendants, built the largest land empire in history—swept across Asia. Rather than simply conquering Tibet, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan formed a special partnership with the head of Sakya, a brilliant scholar-monk named Phagpa (pronunciation). Kublai Khan made Phagpa his religious teacher, and in return the Sakya lamas were given authority to govern Tibet on the Mongols’ behalf. For about a century, Tibet was ruled from Sakya.

Rongbuk Monastery

Beyond the last towns, the road climbs deep into the Himalayas. On the way stands Rongbuk (pronunciation) Monastery, the highest monastery in the world, perched at about 16,340 feet. Founded around the year 1900 by a Nyingma lama, it’s a small, remote, windswept community of monks and nuns.

What draws visitors here, though, is the view. Stand at Rongbuk on a clear day, look south, and Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, fills the sky at the end of the valley—a giant white pyramid rising above everything around it. A white chörten in the foreground and the mountain behind make one of the most famous scenes in the Himalayas.

Everest Base Camp

Just a few miles beyond the monastery lies Everest Base Camp on the Tibetan (north) side of the mountain, at around 16,900 feet. This is the staging area where mountaineers gather before attempting to climb the world’s tallest peak. Climbers usually spend days—sometimes weeks—resting here to let their bodies get used to the altitude, because rushing up too fast can cause dangerous altitude sickness, when the body struggles to cope with the low oxygen high in the mountains.

Base Camp sits at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier, a river of ice that climbers cross on their long, dangerous route toward the summit. Visitors who aren’t climbing often spend a night nearby in traditional tents made partly of yak hair, hoping to wake to a clear morning view of the mountain.

Mount Everest

At the head of the valley stands Mount Everest at 8,848.86 meters (29,031.7 feet) above sea level. That precise height was announced jointly by China and Nepal in December 2020, after surveyors from both countries carefully re-measured the peak—which straddles the border between the two nations.

Everest has more than one name. Tibetans call it Chomolungma (pronunciation), meaning roughly “Goddess Mother of the World,” and in Nepal it’s known as Sagarmatha (pronunciation). Its English name honors Sir George Everest, a British official who led a survey of India in the 1800s; the mountain was named after him by his successor, and the name was officially adopted in 1865.

Everest is still growing taller. The Himalayas were created when two of Earth’s great tectonic plates—the giant slabs that make up the planet’s surface—collided. Around 40 to 50 million years ago, the plate carrying India crashed into the plate carrying Asia. Because both are thick continental rock, neither could slide under the other, so the crumpled edge was pushed skyward into the highest mountains on Earth. India is still pushing north today, which nudges Everest a little higher—only a fraction of an inch each year, but rising all the same.

For a long time, no one had ever reached the top of Everest. That changed on May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa from the Everest region of Nepal, and Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper and climber from New Zealand, became the first people known to stand on the summit. The Sherpa people, famous for their strength and skill at high altitude, remain essential to nearly every Everest expedition to this day.

Kyirong

From the high, dry, treeless plateau of Tibet, descending the other sides of the Alps leads toward Nepal. As the road drops, the barren brown landscape gives way to green hillsides, thick forests, and rushing streams. This happens because the towering Himalayas act like a wall: moist air blowing up from the Indian Ocean drops its rain on the southern slopes, leaving the Tibetan side dry and the Nepali side lush and green.

Kyirong (pronunciation) is a town that sits near the crossing into Nepal, where a bridge over a river connects the two countries. This overland route between Tibet and Nepal is often called one of the most beautiful drives in all of Asia.

Nepal

Nepal is a small country, but it is packed with some of the most extreme geography on the planet. Squeezed between giant India and China, Nepal contains eight of the world’s ten highest mountains—including Everest. In the space of just about 100 miles, the land climbs from steamy jungles, home to tigers and rhinos, all the way up to the icy summits of the Himalayas.

Nepal is the only country in the world where Hinduism is the most common religion—but Buddhism is also deeply woven into daily life, and the two often blend together at the same shrines and festivals. Nepal holds a special place in the Buddhist world for one big reason: the Buddha himself—Siddhartha Gautama, the teacher whose ideas began the religion around 2,500 years ago—was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal.

Kathmandu

Kathmandu (pronunciation) is Nepal’s capital and largest city, home to well over a million people. Sitting in a broad bowl of land called the Kathmandu Valley, the city is more than 2,000 years old and packed with temples, shrines, and history around nearly every corner.

Kathmandu knows the power of the Himalayas firsthand. On April 25, 2015, a massive earthquake—magnitude 7.8, known as the Gorkha earthquake—struck central Nepal, killing roughly 9,000 people and damaging or destroying hundreds of thousands of buildings, including many of the valley’s ancient temples. That earthquake was caused by the very same collision of tectonic plates that built the Himalayas and lifts Everest: as India grinds northward beneath Asia, the pressure sometimes releases suddenly, and the ground shakes.

Bhaktapur

Just outside Kathmandu lies Bhaktapur (pronunciation), one of the best-preserved medieval cities in all of Asia and once the capital of its own powerful kingdom. At the city’s heart is its Durbar Square—durbar means “royal court” or “palace”—a plaza ringed by old temples and palaces where the local kings once ruled. Towering nearby is the Nyatapola (pronunciation) Temple, a graceful five-story pagoda built in 1702 and one of the tallest temples in Nepal. Remarkably, its careful construction helped it survive the 2015 earthquake with little damage while newer buildings around it fell.

Swayambhunath

Back in Kathmandu, one of the most striking sights sits on a hilltop overlooking the whole valley: Swayambhunath (pronunciation), an ancient Buddhist shrine believed to be around 2,000 years old. At its center rises a great white dome topped by a golden spire, and painted on all four sides of that spire are enormous eyes—the “eyes of the Buddha”—gazing out in every direction. Visitors climb a long staircase to reach it, spinning rows of prayer wheels along the way. The site is nicknamed the “Monkey Temple” for the troops of bold monkeys that live there, considered holy.

Pashupatinath

Another temple in Kathmandu is Pashupatinath (pronunciation), the most sacred Hindu temple in Nepal. It sits along the banks of the holy Bagmati River and is dedicated to Shiva—one of the most important gods in Hinduism—in his form as Pashupati, the “Lord of Animals.” For Hindus across South Asia, this is a major pilgrimage destination.

Pashupatinath is also a place where visitors encounter Hindu funeral traditions directly. Along the riverbank are stone platforms where families cremate their loved ones—burning the body—as part of a sacred farewell connected to beliefs about the soul, death, and rebirth. Open-air cremation may be unfamiliar to some visitors, but at Pashupatinath it is a deeply meaningful religious practice that deserves the same respect as more familiar funeral traditions.