Earlier this year, two French photojournalists visited an isolated monastery known as Yachen Gonpa in eastern Tibet. Little known outside of the region, the monastery serves around 8,000 Buddhist monks and nuns, and is probably the largest in Tibet. While the monks stay for only a few weeks at a time, honing their teaching skills to take back home, many of the nuns live there semi-permanently in a huge ‘shanty town’ located in a bend of a river. Over the course of three years, photographers Frederic Lemalet and Frederic Elhorga made several journeys to this remote encampment, gaining a rare insight into the workings of a Tibetan Buddhist metropolis



November 2008