Dege Parkhang 德格印经院

About Dege Parkhang

Its carved wooden blocks preserve religious works alongside literature, medicine and other subjects. Traditional printing uses inked blocks and sheets pressed by hand, connecting the stored texts with a continuing craft. Look at the racks of blocks and the building’s murals and sculpture; a visit should not depend on workers demonstrating at a particular time.

The institution was founded in the seventh year of the Yongzheng era (1729), when the Derge chieftain Denba Tsering (登巴泽仁) built an additional Buddha hall for block-carving and sutra printing within his family temple, Gonchen Monastery (贡钦寺); his son Sonam Gongpo (索朗贡布) later expanded it into the monastery's sutra-printing institute. It was listed as a Sichuan provincial cultural relic protection unit in 1980 and as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level (全国重点文物保护单位) in 1996.

Gonchen Monastery is the leading monastery of the Sakya school. Its printed texts are mainly the Tibetan Kangyur and Tengyur (甘珠尔, 丹珠尔), along with Sakya, Nyingma, Kadam and Jonang works and the Bon-tradition Heibai Hualong Sutra (黑白花龙经). Its earliest printed work, the trilingual Prajnaparamita in Eight Thousand Lines (三体合璧般若八千颂), is considered among the finest of its holdings, and it also produced the widely known Degé edition of the Tibetan Buddhist canon (德格版藏文大藏经).

What to look for

• Carved wooden printing blocks are stored in long, closely packed collections.
• The Tibetan building contains murals and sculpture as well as printing spaces.

Location & getting there

Getting to Dege Parkhang

The printing house is on Wenhua Street in Gengqing town, the Dege county seat. Arrange the final approach to Dege Yinjingyuan on that street and follow the institution’s visitor route.