01 · The ground
All four sit inside one prefecture
This page covers Yushu as a whole, and all four booklets share it. Yushu is not a sight; it is an entire autonomous prefecture in the southwest corner of Qinghai, larger than many countries. What follows here is one place inside it.
| Which way | What it meets |
|---|
| North | Haixi — the Qaidam basin side |
| Northwest | Bayingolin, Xinjiang |
| East | Golog |
| Southeast | Ganzi, Sichuan |
| Southwest | Chamdo and Nagqu, Tibet |
267,000
km² · the whole prefecture
6,860
m · Bukadaban, the high point
3,335
m · Niangla, Nangqian, the low point
Four provinces meet here
Qinghai, Sichuan, Tibet, Xinjiang. Yushu sits on the seam: one step southeast is Sichuan, one step southwest is Tibet, one step northwest is Xinjiang.
Also the seam of three Tibetan worlds. Yushu is Kham — speech, dress and monastic lineage all lean towards Chamdo and Ganzi. North over the Bayan Har range is Amdo; further west is Ü-Tsang.
Four hundred thousand, one city and five counties
About ninety-eight per cent Tibetan, eleven ethnic groups in all. One city and five counties; the seat is Jiegu — the town guests sleep in, and the largest piece of flat ground in the prefecture.
The Tang–Tibet road enters Tibet this way. Chang'an, Xining, Riyue Shan, the source of the Yellow River, Jiegu, then west to Lhasa. Jiegu is the stop on that road you cannot skip, and its name means "where goods are gathered".
64,000 of those 267,000 square kilometres are not run from here. The Tanggula township in the northwest is administered by Haixi, though it still counts inside Yushu's official area. That is why you will meet two figures for the same prefecture, one above 260,000 and one just over 200,000 — not a mistake, two accounting bases.
Under two people a square kilometre. Four hundred thousand spread across 267,000 square kilometres is a very thin spread. The oxygen in the air is only sixty to seventy per cent of what it is at sea level — stairs here make you stop and sentences get shorter, and it has nothing to do with your fitness. The town looking new is the other side of the same coin: at dawn on 14 April 2010 an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 brought nearly every house down, and three years of rebuilding followed.
02 · Stone
One stone, six syllables
Mani piles are everywhere in Tibetan country, but Xinzhaai is different: not a pile but a town — stones built into walls, lanes and stupas, with people walking around it.
What is carved
The six-syllable mantra: om mani padme hum. Avalokiteshvara's mantra, the commonest string of characters in Tibetan country.
Also whole sutras, buddha and bodhisattva figures, wheels, vases, sun and moon.
Stones come in white, red and blue-grey; white dominates, red usually coloured with cinnabar.
Colour is not decoration. Black on white is the commonest; gold on red usually marks a vow or a thank-offering.
Why stone
Stone does not rot. Ink on paper rots, carving in wood decays, bronze melts — stone is the material least likely to disappear.
Carving one stone is one act of merit, and one statement of staying here.
So the pile was not built in one go. It grew stone by stone for three hundred years — which is exactly why it looks the way it does: grown, not designed.
Literally: the jewel in the lotus. Om opens, mani is jewel, padme is lotus, hum closes. Chinese convention writes it in six characters; Tibetan has six syllables with Om as the opening sound.
Each syllable carries readings — six realms, six afflictions, six wisdoms — and the readings differ between lineages. Only the literal sense and the commonest reading are given here.
Do not take a mani stone
A stone with scripture on it is a support for speech; what it carries is text, not ornament. Taking one away is moving what someone else placed there. Local people are forbearing and will not stop you to your face.
It should not need them to.
A mani pile and a mani city are not the same order
Pile: by a road, at a pass, by a lake — a heap of stones, any size, added to by one person or one village.
City: walls, lanes, a chapel, stupas, a cloister of prayer wheels — built into the shape of a town. Xinzhaai is the second, which is why it is called Jiana Mani Stone City and not a mani pile.
What is unusual about mani stones is that they turn devotion into something you can add to: one more stone is one more stone — no conflict, no repetition, no space taken.
For three centuries the pile has only grown, apart from the years it was destroyed. That is the whole secret of its size.
03 · Stone
1715, one man starts stacking
The starting point is specific: a lama from Chamdo settled at Xinzhaai, east of Jiegu, and began carving stone. Three centuries later it is a city.
| 1715founded | Twelfth rabjung, wood sheep year. The First Jiana Lama founded it here. He was one of the three incarnate lines of Jiegu Monastery, known as Jiana Trulku — the Chinese lama — because he spent over twenty years at Emei and Wutai, spoke Chinese, and dressed close to Chinese monastic style. |
| A lifetimehere | He lived out his life at Xinzhaai, carving and teaching. Local account has it that he began because he found a stone in the village on which the mantra had appeared of itself. |
| 1950slargest | At its fullest: 450 m east-west, 100 m north-south, 3 m high. The stones formed a city with a chapel, stupas and a great prayer-wheel hall. |
| 1960s–70sdestroyed | The stone city was dismantled and stones hauled away for road fill, walls and house-building. The only period in which the pile shrank. |
| after 1986rebuilt | Gradually restored, stone by stone, put back. |
| 2005 / 2006 | 2005: certified by Guinness World Records (Shanghai) as the largest mani stone pile by area. 2006: listed by the State Council in the sixth batch of Major Historical and Cultural Sites protected at national level. |
How many stones? More than one count. 2.5 billion (the usual figure for the 1950s extent, and the one used in the Guinness submission); two billion plus, or 2.3 billion (estimates after the 1986 restoration); around four billion (recent figures). These are not arithmetic errors — there is no agreed method of counting. Does a boulder covered in scripture count once, or many times? So no absolute number is given here: tens of billions.
The "world's number one" line
What was certified is the
largest mani stone pile by area; Chinese reporting often renders it as "the world's number one mani pile". Strictly, area was certified — not most stones, not oldest. The phrase is safer with "by area" attached.
04 · Stone
Walk the circuit, half an hour or so
A stone city is not looked at; it is walked. People go clockwise, and in one round the walls, the chapel, the stupas and the flags all pass in front of you.
| Walls | Outer walls about six metres high, built entirely of carved stone. Different sections carry painted buddhas and enlarged mantra slabs. From a distance a wall; close up, all text. |
| Lanes | Gateways on the north, south and west sides, hung with prayer flags. Step through and the walls close in on both sides — the strongest sense of scale here. |
| Chapel | Inside there is a chapel holding a statue of the First Jiana Lama, and the stone on which the mantra is said to have appeared. |
| Wheels | Ten large prayer wheels and over three hundred small ones in a cloister. Clockwise, at an even pace, not shoved. |
| Stupas | Eight white stupas in a row on the east side. The base circuit is usually walked too. |
| Flags | Five colours — blue, white, red, green, yellow — for sky, cloud, fire, water, earth. Each gust is one recitation. Which is why old and frayed flags are left alone. |
| Adding | Many people bring a newly carved stone and set it on the wall. That is why the pile is still growing: not a ruin, but something still going on. |
Five on site: clockwise, never against; do not climb the walls or stand on the stones for a photograph; uncovered head and quiet inside the chapel, and ask at the door about photographs; give way to elderly pilgrims and do not block their line; do not point at images with one finger — the local habit is an open palm.
Why clockwise
Tibetan Buddhist circumambulation goes clockwise, with the right shoulder to the shrine. The Bön tradition goes the other way. So someone walking anticlockwise is not necessarily lost — they may be Bön. Both are present here; look before you judge.
The pile is still growing because every day someone adds a stone. Something begun three hundred years ago has not finished.
05 · One of four
Of the four, this one is measured in centuries
The other three were either built at once or dated by dynasty. This one grew stone by stone, and three hundred years on it has not stopped.
1Water is the measure. A river changes name twice here, and what that reports is terrain changing: plateau, gorge, pasture, farmland, all lined up along one channel. Understand that and the town's position explains itself.
2Stone is time. Stone does not rot; tens of billions of stones over three centuries. This is the only one of the four where time is visible, because it grew stone by stone instead of being built at once.
3Monastery and figures are people. A monastery put on a hill to watch a junction; nine figures cut into a cliff in a gorge. One governs traffic, one governs faith. The distance between them is a day's road — and the distance between the worldly and the renounced.
Choosing among the four
Half a day: water and stone. Both at the edge of town, easy to reach. A full day: add the monastery; the view explains the town and the valley. The temple is twenty kilometres out — an easy road, but allow for the return. You do not need all four. Two understood beat four visited.
What is unusual about Yushu is not any one place but that four things this different sit this close. In one day, from a great river to a heap of stones to a monastery on a hill to nine figures in a gorge — that density is rare.
| Sanjiangyuan 190,700 km² Not a sight but a range: the sources of the Yangtze, Yellow River and Lancang all lie here. |
Jiana Manithis book founded 1715 Tens of billions of carved stones piled into a city over three centuries, still growing. |
| Jiegu Monastery built 1398 A Sakya house on the hill north of town; the Ninth Panchen died here in 1937. |
Princess Temple nine Tang reliefs Vairocana is worshipped inside, not the princess. The figures are cut into the cliff at Beina. |
| Juela Monastery Juela, Nangqian · Kagyu A place outside the four, further south in Nangqian: the morning kora, the mani walls, old prayer flags on the far slope. |
October 2026 · Yushu
Samantha
Compiled from public sources: Yushu prefecture and city tourism material; survey work by the Qinghai Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology; public material from the Guinness World Record application for the Jiana Mani stone city. Where dates and figures are disputed, the text says so. Tickets, opening hours, driving times and durations are deliberately omitted.