Two photographs of Phyang monastery

The first photograph below comes from the Moravian Church House Library and Archive in London. It is in an envelope of loose images, most of which date back to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, there is no clue as to the identity of the photographer, and the condition of the photograph – more faded than the others -  makes me wonder whether it is even older, perhaps as early as the 1880s. Most of the Moravian missionaries who served in Ladakh before the First World War were from Germany, and the caption on the back is written in German. It says simply “Kloster Zang ngon bei Leh” – “Zang ngon monastery near Leh”. Zang ngon – more commonly transliterated as ‘sNang ngon’ - is better known as Phyang.

‘Kloster Zang ngon bei Leh”, Moravian Church House Archive and Library, London.

The feature that most strikes me is the monastery’s fortified appearance. The arrangement of the buildings in the front makes it look like a walled town or village. I imagine that they were designed in that way for defensive purposes, and that would make sense given Ladakh’s history of intermittent conflict with neighbouring regions.

In October I had the opportunity to visit Phyang with David and Naomi Sonam, and the photograph below shows the monastery as it appears today.

Phyang monastery in 2012 Photo by David Sonam, October 2012

As in the older photograph, the outer wall of the monastery follows the shape of the hillside, descending slightly in the centre and upper right of the photograph. However, almost everything else has changed.

The building with the larger windows on the left of the photograph is obviously a very recent construction. Similarly, the larger white building in the centre, which at first sight looks as though it is of some antiquity, does not appear in the older photograph, and must therefore have been constructed or rebuilt  in the last century or so.

In the 2012 photograph we can just see the red walls and flat roof of the Dukhang to the right of the picture. The same wall and roof is also visible in the older image and David points out that this is the oldest part of the monastery. While the outer face of the monastery has changed radically, there may be more continuity inside.

Overall, though, the two photographs serve as a reminder of the extent to which many of Ladakh’s older buildings have been through a continuous process of construction and reconstruction in earlier decades and centuries as well as in more recent times.

John Bray