Gansu Events

Gansu’s calendar is dominated by one of the most extraordinary religious festivals in China.

Monlam at Labrang — February or March

The Great Prayer Festival runs for roughly two weeks after Tibetan New Year and draws tens of thousands of pilgrims to Xiahe from across the Amdo region, many arriving on foot. Its centrepiece is the unfurling of the thangka: an enormous appliqued silk image of the Buddha, some thirty metres long, is carried from the monastery by a procession of monks at dawn and unrolled down a hillside facing the sun, where it is displayed for perhaps an hour while the crowd prostrates and offers scarves. Over the following days come masked cham dances, the butter sculpture display — elaborate coloured figures moulded from yak butter, made in freezing rooms so they hold their shape and destroyed afterwards — and the carrying of the Maitreya statue around the monastery. Dates follow the Tibetan calendar and shift each year, access is sometimes restricted, and confirming both before travelling is essential.

Silk Road festivals — summer

Dunhuang holds an international cultural expo and a series of performances in the desert, and the sand-dune amphitheatre stages shows through the warm months.

Butter sculpture — Tibetan New Year

The butter sculptures made for Monlam are worth their own mention. Monks work for weeks in unheated rooms, dipping their hands in cold water so the yak butter does not soften, building tiered coloured reliefs several metres high of deities, flowers and narrative scenes. They are displayed for a single night by lamplight and then dismantled, which is the point of them.

Hui observances

Eid is marked across Linxia and the corridor towns, with the mosques at their busiest.

Grassland festivals — summer

Tibetan horse racing and community gatherings on the Sangke and Gannan grasslands in July and August.