Draining Lhasa: The Long History of Kyisho’s Aquatic Enclosure and Urban Desiccation

This article traces 1,500 years of human engagement with the water cycle of Kyisho, the floodplain surrounding Lhasa, Tibet. As successive states made Lhasa their capital, Kyisho’s residents and rulers had religious, political and technological imperatives to divide the plain into wet and dry zones. Early cultivators practised irrigation but avoided the sacred sites of lha lu (deities and spirits). The rulers who introduced Buddhism in the seventh century drained marshlands to build the Jokhang and Ramoché temples. Later residents constructed embankments to protect them. As the Mongol, Manchu and British empires extended their influence into Tibet, Lhasa became a centre of pilgrimage and trade, prompting its enriched elites to expand Kyisho’s embankments and their riverside estates. Drainage accelerated after 1951, following Tibet’s incorporation into the PRC and the widespread use of industrial concrete. Intensive construction in the 1990s and 2000s caused environmental degradation. This was followed by the national ‘ecological civilisation’ policy, which sealed Kyisho’s remaining wet zones to conserve them.