Before printing was mechanised, Tibet produced books the way the rest of Asia did: by carving the text in reverse onto a wooden block, inking the block and pressing paper onto it. The blocks were valuable objects, kept and reused for centuries, and the monasteries that held large sets of them effectively controlled what could be published. Three places dominated the trade - Dege in the east, the Potala in Lhasa, and Narthang, west of Shigatse - and Narthang is the one that gave its name to an edition of the canon.
The monastery and its press
Narthang was founded in the twelfth century and developed over the following centuries into a major scholarly institution. Its printing house was at its height in the eighteenth century, when, with imperial patronage, it produced a complete printed edition of the Tibetan Buddhist canon - the Kangyur, the words attributed to the Buddha, and the Tengyur, the commentaries and treatises - carved onto tens of thousands of wooden blocks. That edition, known simply as the Narthang edition, circulated across the plateau and beyond, and it remains one of the standard textual witnesses used by scholars working on Tibetan literature. The blocks themselves were enormous, stored in racks in purpose-built halls, each one carved with several pages of text.
What to see now
The monastery survives on its old site in the fields, with its halls and courtyards in use and a small resident community, and the printing tradition is remembered on the site. The interest for a visitor lies in seeing where this work was done and in understanding what it involved: the carving, the proofing, the storage, the distribution by pack animal along the trade routes, and the fact that a single page might take a carver a day or more. It is a quiet place well off the usual circuit, and the contrast with a modern press could hardly be greater.
Practical notes
Narthang is about half an hour west of Shigatse by road, in open farmland, and can be visited in combination with the city's monastery and the site at Shalu, which lies in the other direction. There is no public transport and no visitor infrastructure, so a car and driver or a local guide is needed; there is also very little interpretation on site, which means the visit depends heavily on what you know in advance. Allow an hour. As always at Tibetan monasteries, walk clockwise, dress modestly and ask before photographing inside the halls.
