Celebrations marking the traditional Shoton Festival, or Yogurt Festival, began in Lhasa, capital of southwest China’s Xizang Autonomous Region, on Sunday.
At around 7 am, nearly 100 monks from the Drepung Monastery in Lhasa carried out the enormous rolled-up thangka painting of Buddha and then spread it on a platform on the hillside for sunning, which signaled the start of the festival.
A long queue of people presented white hadas, a traditional Tibetan scarf symbolizing purity and auspiciousness, to the giant thangka.
The Shoton Festival, celebrated mainly in Lhasa, originated in the middle of the 11th century and was among the first to be inscribed on China’s national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2006.
