The history of Karma Gon is inseparable from the Tai Situpas, the line of scholar-monks who served as its guardians across centuries. Deshin Shekpa, the 5th Karmapa Lama, gave the title of Situ to his disciple Chokyi Gyaltsen in the fifteenth century, appointing him Master of Studies at the monastery. What followed was a relay of stewardship spanning generations. The third Situ, Tashi Paljor, and the fourth, Chokyi Gocha, together built a fine library and embellished the monastery walls with rare paintings and carvings during the sixteenth century. The Tai Situpas also played a crucial role in identifying successive Karmapa incarnations -- a spiritual responsibility that carried political weight across the Kham region. But in 1717, the eighth Tai Situpa, the distinguished scholar Chokyi Jungne, left to establish Palpung Monastery, and Karma Gon's preeminence began to fade.

At its peak, Karma Gon's Assembly Hall stood on a hundred pillars, one of the largest such halls in all Tibet. Twelve chapels radiated from its core, their walls covered in murals illustrating the deeds of the Buddha and the history of the Karma Kagyu lineage. Three gilded brass images of the Buddhas of the Three Times occupied the inner sanctum, and a large central figure of Shakyamuni Buddha sat on a sandalwood throne personally designed by the 8th Karmapa. The surviving buildings reveal a remarkable architectural fusion -- Tibetan, Naxi, and Chinese styles interwoven, evidence of the monastery's reach as far south as Lithang. One room remains sealed behind a curtain of chain mail, where a hundred monks still study the commentaries of the 8th Karmapa. In the Khandro Bumtang meadow beside the temple, three ancient stupas hold the relics of the First Karmapa, the First Situ Rinpoche, and Wangchuk Chobar.

The Cultural Revolution struck Karma Gon with devastating force. The fine library, the paintings, the carvings that the Situpas had spent centuries creating -- most were destroyed. Only a few old buildings survived. Yet the monastery's story has always been one of cyclical renewal. As early as the thirteenth century, when Karma Pakshi, the 2nd Karmapa and a child prodigy ordained at age 22, visited and found the complex in poor repair, he undertook a complete restoration. In 2005, Chokling Jigmed Palden Rinpoche accepted the monks' request to help rebuild the hermitage of the treasure-revealer Chokgyur Lingpa, who had lived for years in the Sang Ngak Podrang -- the Secret Mantra Palace -- above the monastery. The Chinese government and the Tibet Autonomous Region have also provided funds for restoration, recognizing Karma Gon among Tibet's famous monasteries worthy of preservation.

Above the main temple, ruined hermitages cling to the crags, their outlines marked by prayer flags that snap in the mountain wind. The hermitage of the First Karmapa is among them -- now just stone walls and colored cloth, but still a site of pilgrimage. Two active retreat centers operate above the monastery, dedicated to the practices of Chodruk and Dorje Drolo. Behind the ancient stupas stands a chapel housing the gilded reliquary of Karma Pakshi, complete with sacred tooth relics. A newly built monastic college nearby will eventually hold five hundred monks, a number that echoes the original community's ambition. The Dzachu River still runs past below, indifferent to the centuries, while the monastery continues the work that an elderly master began more than eight hundred years ago on its bank.