Nako Monastery — Rinchen Zangpo's four 996 CE Lhakhang temples.
Most travellers approaching Nako from the Spiti circuit assume the lakeside village is just a photogenic acclimatisation stop on the Tabo road. They miss that the four Lhakhang temples at the back of the village were founded in 996 CE by Rinchen Zangpo — the same year and same monk-translator who founded Tabo, making Nako one of the three pillars (Tabo · Nako · Lalung) of the Western Himalayan Buddhist circuit.WHY NOBODY KNOWS
Rinchen Zangpo (958-1055 CE), the "Great Translator", led the second propagation of Buddhism in Tibet and is credited with founding roughly 100 monasteries between Ladakh, Spiti, Kinnaur and Western Tibet. Nako's four small temples — Lotsava Lhakhang, Lhakhang Gongma, Lhakhang Yogma, Khandromas Lhakhang — survive with original 11th-13th century mural fragments. Italian Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci documented the complex in his 1933 expedition and published it in Indo-Tibetica III (1935-36), which established the academic art-history corpus for Nako and Tabo together. Photography typically not permitted inside main shrines; the lama-on-duty may open specific Lhakhangs on request.
