Yarchen Gar belongs to the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, the oldest of the four major schools. It sits in the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in the historical region of Kham, a landscape of high passes and deep river valleys where Tibetan culture persisted even as political boundaries shifted around it. The altitude alone makes life here an act of devotion. Winters are brutal, oxygen is scarce, and the nearest paved road was, for decades, a rough suggestion rather than an actual surface. The residents chose austerity deliberately. Their small dwellings, densely packed across the hillsides, had no running water and minimal electricity. Practitioners came from across Tibet and China, drawn by the monastery's reputation for rigorous meditation practice and by the community of fellow seekers who had gathered in this improbable place.

The dismantling began in 2001, when Chinese authorities demolished residences and evicted monks and nuns. The campaign intensified over the years. By April 2019, the monastery was closed to foreigners entirely. In May of that year, forced removals of an estimated 7,000 residents began. The evictions were not merely administrative. Expelled nuns and monks were detained in political re-education centers and compelled to participate in patriotic exercises. Reports emerged of sexual violence against nuns and torture of both nuns and monks. By the end of 2019, more than half of the settlement's dwellings had been razed. A parallel campaign targeted Larung Gar, another major Buddhist encampment in the region. Many monks and nuns displaced from Larung Gar had relocated to Yarchen Gar, only to face the same destruction a second time.

The U.S. Department of State expressed concern over the ongoing demolitions at both Yarchen Gar and Larung Gar in 2018. International Buddhist organizations documented the destruction through satellite imagery, revealing the scale of what was lost: row after row of small wooden structures reduced to bare ground. For the women and men who had devoted their lives to practice at Yarchen Gar, the demolitions meant more than the loss of shelter. They meant the scattering of a community that had taken decades to build, the severing of teacher-student relationships that are central to Tibetan Buddhist practice, and the forced abandonment of a way of life chosen freely and maintained through extraordinary hardship. The valley itself remains. The altitude and the light and the silence that drew practitioners to this place have not changed. Whether a community of that scale can reassemble in a landscape of surveillance and restriction is a different question entirely.

Satellite images from before and after 2019 tell the story more starkly than words can. Where thousands of small dwellings once covered the hillsides in a dense mosaic of red and brown, empty ground now stretches between the remaining structures. The monastery's official website still exists, but the community it describes has been fundamentally altered. Yarchen Gar stands as testimony to what a determined community can build in one of the world's least hospitable environments, and to how quickly political power can unmake it. The nuns who gave the settlement its name are scattered now, their whereabouts largely unknown, their stories largely untold beyond the reports of human rights organizations. The City of Nuns persists as a name for a place that has been substantially emptied of the people who earned it.