Jokhang Monastery
About 1.5 km from the Potala Palace stands the Jokhang Temple (http://xz.people.com.cn/GB/138902/139226/140746/8495114.html), built in the middle of the seventh century.
The original monastery housed only eight shrines and its scale was small in comparison with today's Jokhang, whose building area amounts to 25,000 sq. m. It was expanded and repaired several times in the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, notably under the Fifth Dalai Lama Lozang Gyatso.
As the center of Tibetan Buddhism, the Jokhang has a great number of Buddhist statues and images of eminent monks of various sects of Buddhism. In addition, the monastery has a collection of various kinds of tangkas, religious instruments, offertory objects and other religious and cultural relics and artworks. They include an embroidered tangka of the tantric deity Samvara, presented by the Ming Emperor Yongle.
