In her paper on Tibetan Buddhist nunneries,Karma Lekshe Tsomo writes about little known statistics about the number of nunneries prior to communist invasion in 1959:

“These findings indicate a total number of 618 nunneries in the various traditions, of which 290 were rNying-ma, 160 dGe-lugs, 128 bKa’- brgyud and 40 Sa-skya. There were 7141 nuns residing in rNying-ma nun- neries, 6831 in dGe-lugs, 3697 in bKa’-brgyud and 1159 in Sa-skya- a total of 12,398 nuns altogether, making Tibet the home of one of the largest communities of Buddhist nuns in the world” (Tsomo 1987).

Tsomo lists  the bKa’-brgyud nunnery known as dGe-chak Thek- chen-glin as the largest nunnery reported with 1000 nuns, larger than any other Buddhist nunneries in the world. This nunnery was located in Nangchen in Eastern Tibet. On the “Nunneries and Monasteries Map” page on this site, there is a pin in Nangchen representing Gebchak Gonpa, which I believe is the same as the nunnery Tsomo is talking about here, though I was unable to confirm this.

I tried to use this paper’s list of nunneries with at least 100 resident nuns, but was unable to find locations for any of the nunneries. I hypothesize that this may be because the paper is from 1987, because I’m having trouble searching for Tibetan names since search engines won’t recognize them, or because it’s difficult to find this information about Tibetan locations given the restrictions from the Chinese government. I’m also not sure how many of these nunneries still exist after the communist invasion

The Tibetan Nuns Project also lists a number of Tibetan Buddhist Nunneries on their website, however, all of these nunneries are ones which have relocated – primarily to Northern India and some to Nepal. Because this project was about mapping space in Tibet, I decided to take national borders into account and only map nunneries in Tibet/in China, meaning I did not include any of these nunneries which are in India or Nepal. A number of these nunneries are located near Dharamsala.

 

Notes:

Locating Gebchak Gonpa

The map below is the closest approximation of the location of the nunnery at Gebchak Gonpa that I could find. Descriptions include that the nunnery is in the remote highlands of Easter Tibet and that it is in Nangchen County, so the location of Gebchak Gonpa on my Nunnery Map is a best approximation of the location depicted in the map below.