Lake Manasarovar, China - Lake

Lakes, Monastery

Lake Manasarovar or Mapham Yum-tso (Victorious Lake) in Tibetan is the most respected of Tibet's many lakes. According to primordial Hindu and Buddhist cosmology the four great rivers of the Indian sub-continent, the Indus, Ganges, Sutlej and Brahmaputra, crop up from Manasarovar. In reality, only the Sutlej River derives at the lake, though the headwaters of the other mighty rivers are in close propinquity. Just 20km from Mt Kailash across the Barkha plain, Manasarovar can be circumambulated in four or five days. Five of the original eight monasteries in the area have been moderately reconstructed. Manasarovar is connected to the smaller Lake Rakshas Tal (also known as Lhanag-tso) by a canal called Ganga-chu. On rare instances, water flows via this canal from Lake Manasarovar to Rakshas Tal; this is said to bode well for the Tibetan people. The canal had long been arid, but water has undeniably been curving between the two lakes in recent years. The two bodies of water are linked with the conjoined sun and moon, an influential pictogram of Tantric Buddhism.