When is the best time to play Barkhor Street?
Barkhor Street is the oldest street in Lhasa, also known as Bajiao Street. In the past, it was only around Jokhang Temple, which Tibetans called the holy road. Today, Barkhor Street is not only a turning road, but also a shopping corridor full of ethnic characteristics. This is a complete old city with a strong Tibetan life. Most of the streets composed of stone Tibetan buildings retain their original features, and the ground is covered with hand-made slates. When you visit Barkhor Street, you can choose your favorite souvenirs at will. You can also feel the mystery of religion from that step-by-step piety.
Almost all the houses across Barkhor Street are shops, and various commodities show people all aspects of Tibetan life, such as thangka, bronze Buddha, prayer wheel, butter lamp, prayer flags, prayer beads, tributes, pine and cypress branches and so on. There are many daily necessities, such as card mats, aprons, hides, saddles, snuff bottles, fire sickle, Tibetan quilts, Tibetan shoes, Tibetan knives, Tibetan hats, butter barrels, wooden bowls, highland barley wine, sweet tea, milk residue, air-dried meat and so on. Tourism commodities of all ethnic groups are concentrated in Barkhor Street with a circumference of only 1000 meters, which is cheap and good. Barkhor Street is a microcosm of the human landscape in Lhasa and even the whole Tibetan area. This time-honored roundabout is always crowded with worshippers from all over the world, including those who come along the highway, those who drive trucks, monks who practice, and Khampa people who do business. In short, people from different parts of Tibetan areas can be seen on Barkhor Street. See different clothes, different languages. Now even the clothes that monks look similar vary from sect to sect. Barkhor Street can be said to be a window to understand Tibetan areas, and everything about it is silently telling the history of Lhasa.
history
Barkhor Street was originally just Jokhang Temple, which is a turning road around Barkhor Street. According to Tibetan Buddhism, the clockwise detour around Jokhang Temple is regarded as a turning point, which means Siddhartha Gautama enshrined in Jokhang Temple is one of the three famous turning points in Lhasa. The daily flow of people around Jokhang Temple in Barkhor Street proves that it is the most famous turning road in Lhasa. In addition, there are two turning roads that echo Barkhor Street, namely, the forest outline around the whole old city of Lhasa, including Potala Palace, that is, the outer turning road, and the other is the mysterious capsule outline, that is, the turning corridor in Jokhang Temple. These three paths confirm and maintain the central position of Jokhang Temple, which is not only a temple dedicated to Buddha statues and sacred objects, but also a realistic representation of the ideal model of the universe in Buddhist classics, that is, the tantric theory of Roman (Tancheng). Nowadays, the geographical concept of Barkhor Street is much broader. The block around Jokhang Temple is called Barkhor Street, which is a well-preserved old city in Lhasa.
Bajiaojie legend
To go to Barkhor Street, there is one place you must go: Maggie Ami Tavern. Most of the buildings in Barkhor Street are white, except for a two-story building painted with yellow in the southeast corner of Barkhor Street. This is the secret palace of the 6th Dalai Lama Cangyang Gyatso. He once wrote the famous "Top of the East" here. At the top of the mountain in the east, a bright moon rises, and the face of an unmarried girl always appears in front of my eyes. Unmarried Jiao Niang is a Maggie Ami in Tibetan. Now Maggie Ami Tavern is an art bar with great artistic taste. Its walls are covered with paintings, photography and handicrafts, and there are original works by Kafka and Eliot on the bookshelf.