Norbulingka and the Tibetan Kangra

Dharamshala is known for one thing and most visitors see the smallest version of it. The Dalai Lama’s temple at the top of the hill takes a morning, and then people go and look at a waterfall.

What is actually here is a network of institutions rebuilt from scratch after 1959, spread down the valley from Sidhpur to Bir, most of which are open, none of which is on a coach route, and several of which are doing work of a standard you would go a long way to see.

Why the trip goes downhill from McLeod Ganj

The exile community is not concentrated on the ridge. It never was.

McLeod Ganj holds the administration, the temple and the market, because that is where land was available in 1960. The workshops, the colleges and the big monasteries went where there was room and water — Sidhpur, Sidhbari, Taragarh, Bhattu, Bir — and that is a forty-kilometre string along the foot of the Dhauladhar rather than a hill station.

So this trip drives down and along. It is the opposite direction from every other Dharamshala itinerary, including our own day tour, and it is why almost nobody does it.

Norbulingka, and what a craft institute is for

Founded in 1988 by Kelsang and Kim Yeshi and opened to visitors in 1995, named for the Dalai Lamas’ summer palace outside Lhasa.

The purpose is narrower and more interesting than “preserving culture”. Tibetan statue making, thangka painting, appliqué and woodcarving are trades with apprenticeships, and in 1959 the chain of transmission for all of them was broken. Norbulingka exists to run those apprenticeships — six years for a thangka painter — so that the skills have somewhere to be passed down.

You can watch it happening. A painter grinding mineral pigment, a metalworker raising a face out of sheet copper, a room of people cutting silk for appliqué. The temple at the top of the garden holds a four-metre gilded Sakyamuni and 1,173 painted Buddhas, and it was built by the people you have just watched working.

Sherabling is the one nobody has heard of

Eight kilometres up a side road from Baijnath, in pine forest, and the seat of the 12th Kenting Tai Situpa.

It is a Kagyu establishment with a monastic college, a library and a very large main shrine hall, and the thing that strikes everyone is how quiet it is compared with anywhere on the ridge. There is no market outside it, no ticket, and often nobody in the courtyard at all. The forest comes right up to the walls.

Tashi Jong, half an hour before it, is the opposite kind of place: not a monastery with a village attached but a Khampa community with a monastery in the middle of it, still making things — thangkas, metalwork, textiles — and still recognisably a settlement of people from a particular part of eastern Tibet.

What to do with your hands and your feet

Two practical notes that make the difference between visiting and intruding.

Walk clockwise around anything — stupas, temples, prayer wheel rows. It is the convention everywhere on this itinerary and getting it wrong is the one thing that will make somebody visibly wince.

Do not point your feet at an image or a person, which mostly means being careful how you sit down in a hall. Sit cross-legged or kneel; nobody minds a bad job of it. And if you arrive at Gyuto while the hall is chanting, stand at the back and stay there — the low multiphonic sound the Gyuto monks are known for is a liturgy rather than a recital, it does not stop for an audience, and the worst thing you can do to it is walk about looking for an angle.