Before 1959, Drapchi was a military garrison. British diplomat Frederick Williamson photographed its buildings in the early 1930s, capturing the Drapchi Lekhung on the north side of the main compound on August 31, 1933. In those years, the site served the Tibetan army, housed a mint that produced Tibetan currency, and performed various administrative functions for the Ganden Phodrang government. The 1959 Tibetan Uprising changed everything. After the People's Liberation Army crushed the revolt and the Dalai Lama fled to India, the garrison was converted into a prison. It became the largest in Tibet and the main facility for judicially sentenced prisoners. According to the Central Tibetan Administration, the prison quickly gained a notorious reputation among Tibetans for its harsh management. For the next several decades, Drapchi was the institution that political detainees feared most, its reputation spread through exile communities and human rights reports alike.

The stories that emerged from Drapchi were often stories of women. In November 1994, thirteen nuns received five-year sentences for "endangering state security" - their crime had been protesting Chinese rule in Lhasa. They joined dozens of other female political prisoners in Unit 3 of the prison. In April 1996, nearly one hundred women in that unit launched a hunger strike to protest their treatment. The strike lasted a week. Prison officials, concerned that deaths among the inmates would draw further international attention to conditions inside, reportedly promised reforms. Whether those promises were kept depended on who was telling the story. The Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government-in-exile based in Dharamsala, continued to document allegations of brutality. International human rights organizations echoed their findings.

Drapchi was once the only official prison in Tibet, but the system expanded. Following a 1994 change in Chinese law, former labor camps known as laogai were reclassified as prisons. Facilities like Powo Tramo gained official prison status. Then in 2005, the newer Chushur Prison, also known as Qushui, was built and became the primary facility for political detainees. Chushur was modern, purpose-built, and farther from international scrutiny than Drapchi's mile-from-downtown location allowed. Chinese authorities described the investment in the Tibet Autonomous Region Prison system as creating a "modern and civilised prison," reporting that more than 60 million yuan had been spent between 1997 and 2004 on construction and facilities upgrades. The language of modernization sat uneasily alongside the ongoing detention of people whose primary offense was dissent.

Drapchi still stands in Lhasa, though its role has shifted since Chushur took over as the primary political detention facility. The compound is close enough to the city center that residents pass it on their daily routines, a proximity that makes its history impossible to fully compartmentalize. For the Tibetan exile community, Drapchi remains a potent symbol of resistance and suffering under Chinese rule. The testimonies of former prisoners, people like the nun Passang Lhamo who testified before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus on May 6, 2002, describing conditions inside the facility, form part of a record that outlasts the walls themselves. The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy has published detailed reports documenting Drapchi's history and the experiences of its inmates. The prison also goes by the name Delapuxie in some Chinese-language sources, a detail that has occasionally caused confusion, with some databases listing it as a separate facility. It is not. There is only one Drapchi, and its history is singular enough.