Jokhang Temple

The first two stops are in the square and are free. Then you go in. The last stop is the street outside.

1. The square: a temple that faces west

The square is new. Until 1985 houses came right up to the gate. They were cleared to make an open space.

The two tall poles wrapped in cloth are prayer masts. The white stoves are for juniper smoke.

Tibetan histories give the reason for the western door: it looks towards Nepal, the home of Queen Bhrikuti. Whatever the reason, the choice was made in the 600s and never changed. Each later builder added rooms around the old core and kept the door where it was.

The dark band under the roof is not paint. It is bundles of tamarisk twigs, cut short, stacked end-on and dyed. Only temples and palaces were allowed it. It is light, and it lets the wall breathe.

2. Three things in front of the gate

To the left of the gate, behind a wall, stands a stone pillar. It was set up in 823. It records a treaty of peace between the Tibetan emperor and the Tang emperor of China, sworn in both capitals in 821 and 822.

The text is cut in Tibetan and in Chinese, side by side. It calls the two rulers "nephew and uncle", because Tibetan kings had twice married Tang princesses. It says each side shall keep the land it holds and neither shall raise an army against the other. It is one of the oldest dated pieces of written Tibetan anywhere.

Beside it is a second, rougher stone, covered with small pits. A Qing (1644–1912) official set it up in 1794. It told people how to nurse those sick with smallpox instead of driving them into the hills.

Between them is the stump of an old willow, also walled in.

3. The porch and the open court

In the porch four large figures guard the door, two on each side. They are the kings of the four directions. Every Tibetan temple has them, as Chinese temples do.

For two hundred years a bronze bell hung in this porch with Latin words cast on it: Te Deum laudamus, "We praise thee, O God". It came from the chapel of Italian Capuchin friars who lived in Lhasa from 1707 to 1745. It is now kept in store.

Past the porch is an open court with a painted gallery round it. This is where Tsongkhapa's Great Prayer Festival was held. The throne of the Dalai Lama stood on the north side.

The walls are painted with a thousand Buddhas, and with the story of the temple itself. Look for a lake being filled in, and for goats carrying loads of earth.

A passage lined with butter lamps leads from the court to the inner door.

4. The oldest wood in Tibet

The first temple was a square, two floors high, with small rooms on all four sides opening on to a hall in the middle. That is the plan of a monastery in India, such as Nalanda, where monks' cells surround a court. The Chinese archaeologist Su Bai made this comparison after measuring the building.

You are now inside that square. The hall has since been roofed over and raised. The rooms round it are the chapels you will walk past.

Look at the door frames of the chapels on the ground floor, and at the short, thick pillars. Several are carved with small figures, lions and curling leaves in the style of the Kathmandu valley. Scholars date them to the 600s. They are the oldest carved wood in Tibet, and among the oldest anywhere in Asia still doing its first job.

For comparison: the oldest wooden hall in China, at Nanchan Temple on Mount Wutai, dates from 782.

The middle of the hall is filled by statues several metres high. One is Padmasambhava, the Indian master who Tibetans say tamed the land for Buddhism. One is Maitreya, the Buddha to come. One is Avalokiteshvara, the lord of compassion, with a thousand arms.

5. The Jowo

Straight ahead, at the east end, is the smallest and most crowded room. The line of pilgrims has been moving towards it since they came in.

The statue shows the Buddha at the age of twelve, as a prince. It is of gilded metal, about a metre and a half high. You see very little of the metal. It wears a crown and robes of gold set with turquoise, coral and pearls, given over many centuries.

The crown is the important change. A plain Buddha is a monk, with no ornaments. In 1409 Tsongkhapa gave this statue a crown, and so turned the image of a monk into the image of a heavenly king. Some monks of the time objected.

Tibetan histories say Princess Wencheng brought the statue from China in 641, and that it was first kept at the Ramoche temple, ten minutes' walk north of here. When Tibetans feared a Chinese attack it was hidden here, behind a door that was plastered over. Princess Jincheng found it two generations later. The statue the Nepalese queen had brought went to the Ramoche in exchange. Each temple has held the other's statue ever since.

Each pilgrim climbs the steps at the side, touches their head to the statue's knee, and is moved on by a monk. They may have walked for half a year for those two seconds.

Photographs are not allowed anywhere in the chapels.

6. Upstairs: a king, two queens and a golden urn

On the upper floor, above the entrance, is the chapel of King Songtsen Gampo. He sits in the middle. Wencheng and Bhrikuti sit on either side. In Tibetan belief the two queens are forms of the goddess Tara, one white and one green.

From the 1600s until 1959 the rooms on the upper floors were also offices. The council of ministers of the Tibetan government met here. Church and state were one thing, and this was the building for both.

In 1793 the Qianlong Emperor sent a golden urn to Lhasa. When a new Dalai Lama or Panchen Lama had to be found, the names of the boys put forward were written on ivory slips, placed in the urn, and one was drawn in front of the Jowo. A second urn was kept in Beijing, at the Lama Temple, for Mongolian lamas. The urn was last used here in 1995.

7. The roof

Climb to the roof. Here photographs are allowed.

The wheel between two deer stands over the front of every Tibetan monastery. The Buddha gave his first teaching in a deer park near Varanasi in India. The wheel is the teaching, with eight spokes for its eight parts. The deer are the first to listen. One is a stag and one a doe.

The gilded roofs behind you each cover one chapel below. The oldest were given in the 1300s by kings from the far west of Tibet and Nepal. The tall gold cylinders are banners of victory. The dragons' heads at the corners are water spouts.

Now look west, over the square. The white and red building on its hill is the Potala Palace, two kilometres away. In the 600s the king's fort stood on that hill and his temple stood here. Lhasa is the space between the two.

The temple was closed and badly damaged in the Cultural Revolution, from 1966. Many statues were destroyed, and for some years parts of it were used as a guesthouse. Repairs began in 1972 and it was open for worship again by 1980. Much of what you saw downstairs was remade then. The building, the old woodwork and, by all accounts, the Jowo came through.

On 17 February 2018 a fire broke out at the back of the temple. It was put out the same evening, and pilgrims were let in again the next day.

8. The Barkhor: the street that is a prayer

Lhasa has three pilgrim circuits, one inside the next. The inner one is the corridor of prayer wheels round the chapels you have just seen. The outer one is eight kilometres long and takes in the Potala. The middle one is the Barkhor, about a kilometre, round the outside wall of the temple.

Go out of the gate, turn left, and walk with everyone else. At each of the four corners there is a great stove for juniper. Old houses of Lhasa's noble and merchant families line the way, with black-framed windows that widen towards the bottom.

At the south-east corner is a house painted yellow. It is a restaurant called Makye Ame. The words come from a song by the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, and mean something like "mother I was not born to", a way of speaking of a beloved.

ཤར་ཕྱོགས་རི་བོའི་རྩེ་ནས། དཀར་གསལ་ཟླ་བ་ཤར་བྱུང་། མ་སྐྱེས་ཨ་མའི་ཞལ་རས། ཡིད་ལ་འཁོར་འཁོར་བྱས་བྱུང་།

From the peak of the eastern mountain the clear white moon has risen. The face of the mother I was not born to keeps turning in my mind.

Tsangyang Gyatso, the Sixth Dalai Lama (1683–1706), the first of his songs; our translation

Chinese readers know this place from a song. "A Diao", written by the singer Zhao Lei in 2016, is about a Tibetan woman, and one line sets her in the sunlight in front of the Jokhang's gate with a flask of sweet tea. Sweet milk tea, drunk by the glass in crowded tea houses, is Lhasa's daily habit. There are several a few steps from the square.

The Chinese film Paths of the Soul (2017), directed by Zhang Yang, follows eleven villagers who prostrate their way along 1,200 kilometres of road to Lhasa. Ordinary villagers play themselves. Their road ends on the flagstones of this square. If you want the same frame, stand at the back of the square, between the two tall masts, and face the gate. Photograph the stones and the gate. Leave the pilgrims' faces out.

Two Hollywood films of 1997 are set here, and neither was shot here. The Lhasa of Seven Years in Tibet, with Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer, was built in the Andes of Argentina. Martin Scorsese's Kundun was made in Morocco.