placesThe Barkhorབར་སྐོར་
said bar-KOR; Wylie bar-skor
also: Barkhor Street · Bakuo · Pargor
placeThe Himalaya and TibetChinaconfidence mediumneeds checking
A ring of street about a kilometre round, circling the Jokhang temple in the old city of Lhasa. It is at once the city's commercial centre and a circuit walked as devotion. Traffic goes one way, clockwise, and some of the people on it are not walking but measuring the ring out in full-body prostrations.
citedWhen
7th century CE to now still carried cited
| Period | Tibetan imperial to the present |
|---|---|
| How the date is known | textual — a dated text describes it |
| Note | The article dates the street's origin to the 7th century CE; from_year is the opening of that century, not a precise foundation. |
Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.
The story
The circuit came from the temple. Songtsen Gampo and Princess Wencheng led the move to Lhasa and built the Jokhang; people began to turn around the temple, and the path their feet wore became a road. That road is one of the three circumambulation routes of Lhasa — the others are the Lingkhor and the Woesor — and it is the oldest street in the city, dated in origin to the 7th century CE and still carrying the plan of the old town.
Tibetans call it the holy road. The direction is not decorative: you walk with the turning of the prayer cylinder, which is to say clockwise, right shoulder to the temple.
The street is also the busiest commercial one in the old city. Inference — the objects this atlas is about are made and worn across this region — the agate dzi bead, the amulet box at the throat, the printed cloth flag — but no source read for this record itemises a Barkhor stall, and this record does not furnish one. On the street's present policing and regulation this atlas has read nothing it can cite, and it does not speculate.
Now
In use as both a market street and a kora, on the published accounts this project has read. No day is marked open or closed below.
Where
Barkhor East, South, West and North Streets, Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region · 29.6531, 91.1322 precision: street harvested
hand-placed on the Jokhang, using Wikidata item Q735914 (Jokhang), coordinate location P625, queried 2026-09-16; the Barkhor is the ring around that temple
Nobody has published days this project could read. That is not the same as closed.
What is on record about it
- A market you can walk — named as the commercial centre and busiest street of the old city of Lhasa cited
- A pilgrimage site — one of the three circumambulation routes of Lhasa; walkers prostrate along it, and Tibetans call it the holy road cited
What this is near
What names this one
Each in its own words, from its own page.
Where this came from
- Barkhor — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Dzi bead — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Prayer flag — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Tibetan Buddhism — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Elsewhere
Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.