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Chinese New Year can be a curiously lonely time for visitors to China. Like Christmas, the Spring Festival, as the New Year is known here, is an occasion to be with family. Unlike the Western holiday, though, Chinese festivities are almost exclusively focused around close relatives and events within the home.

In such a densely populated country, the streets of China's towns and cities can seem unsettlingly quiet on New Year's Day. But there are a few places around the country where travellers can find excitement around the New Year. And the best of these may be the Labrang Monastery in the village of Xiahe, in central Gansu province. A full day's travel from Beijing, the monastery marks the first full moon of the Lunar New Year with the Sunning of the Buddha festival.

The trauma and sadness that have come to define the Tibetan experience over the past half-century perhaps explain why the riotous celebrations that transform this little hamlet for two weeks every New Year still thrive in this remote outpost of Tibetan culture.

In fact, it's a miracle that this tiny bastion of Tibetan-ness survives at all, an island in a sea of other cultures.

You would never guess that, though, if you visited for the New Year celebration, when thousands-strong crowds throng the village for the Sunning of the Buddha, the biggest celebration of all the Tibetan monasteries. Before dawn on the first day of the festival, masked actors and excitable horses parade through the streets, driving the crowds toward the hills. Teams of monks then carry the massive thangka -- a sacred image of the Buddha painted on a huge piece of cloth -- up the slopes toward a sloping platform. As the sacred scroll draws closer, pilgrims scamper up to get the best view of this centuries-old ritual. At last, as morning comes, the thangka is unfurled on the hill and the Buddha greets the first rays of the rising sun.

This is only the beginning of the festivities, though. For days to come the town will be engulfed in musical performances, displays of Buddhist sculptures and public debates between the monks that continue long into the evening.

Like many visitors to China, I had long been drawn to Tibetan culture. While travelling through Gansu province on a trip along the old Silk Road route a few months before the New Year, I got the chance to experience it. At a fork in the old trade route in a small town on the mouth of the Gobi desert, I decided to take a detour. That took me right across the province and up into the mountains to Labrang, the home of this fabled festival, and the only one of the five main monasteries of the Yellow Hat Sect outside of the Tibetan plateau itself.

The journey there is an education in itself about the changing face of China. In the provincial capital of Lanzhou, a 20-hour train ride from Beijing, my two year-old guidebook is already obsolete. My maps are useless -- whole streets have disappeared. The "Stalinist" hotel my guidebook recommended as the best low-budget option in town has been retooled and reborn as a gilt-edged four-star joint, replete with tuxedoed footmen.

From Lanzhou, I traverse the great plains of the Yellow River, through Islamic-flavoured towns, and up into the foothills of the Himalayas. The silver-topped minarets of village mosques gradually give way to villages, white Buddhist stupas and prayer flags of Tibet.

As the bus heaves over the many twisted peaks on the route, some passengers fling pieces of coloured paper out the windows, flittering prayers for a safe journey. The blessings work, and we roll down into the village of Xiahe after dark.

On my first morning there, I join the parade down the main street -- the only street -- of this tiny village. The squat concrete buildings and paved road of the modern quarter quickly give way to the mazy, dusty tracks and ancient mud-brick buildings of the monastery itself.

Soon after, the first rays of the morning sun breach the ridge of mountains that shroud the monastery. A magnificent golden stupa, the centrepiece of the complex, glistens in the early light.

A small band of monks emerges on top of the highest building in the complex, carrying enormous gilt-covered instruments. The eerie drone of a horn, punctuated by a crashing gong, echoes around the crescent-shaped valley and along the rows of flat-roofed houses.

The monastery is suddenly awake. Monks shuffle out of hidden side streets and hurry toward the temples. As they rush past, many devotees are busy tying cushions and padding to their hands and knees. When they're done, they will prostrate themselves, sometimes for hours, outside the temples.

While the vast majority of Labrang's visitors are devotees on pilgrimage, the monks are surprisingly accommodating to the small but steady stream of tourists -- both Chinese and foreign -- that pass through the village. Several times a day, they take small groups on tours of the 300-year complex. After the morning services, I join one led by an English-speaking monk.

We enter the school of scripture, where scholars are hunched over Sanskrit tomes. We pass through the courtyard of the medical college, where students are burning pungent plants in large urns to make herbal medicine. We are guided into dust-layered chambers where a multitude of sacred manuscripts written hundreds of years ago in pure silver are rolled up in pigeon holes that line the walls and reach two storeys up. The last stop is the great prayer hall. Inside, all is darkness, illuminated only by the soft glow of yak butter candles, positioned around the enormous room.

The air is electric with hummed chants of the senior monks. Pulsating music drifts from some distant room. In this room, as in every other we have visited on the tour, the most sacred place is reserved for a photo of the Dalai Lama, revered by these monks as a living god. At one end of the prayer hall, which doubles as a lecture theatre, his image sits on a small throne. This, the tour guide explains, is where they hope he will one day sit and teach them, if he is ever allowed back into China from his 50-year exile.

More poignant still is the photo of a bright-eyed young boy of no more than 5 that sits next to every image of the Dalai Lama. The child is wearing robes and a pointed hat that are clearly several sizes too big. This is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the 11th Panchen Lama, second only in importance to the Dalai Lama in the pantheon of Yellow Hat Buddhism. The child staring out from the photos would be 17 by now, but the monks have only this picture of him.

His whereabouts have been unknown since he and his family were snatched by the Communist authorities in 1995. "He lives in Beijing now," our guide explains tactfully. "We don't have contact with him. But we say prayers." The guide doesn't mention any of this directly, gently deflecting questions about the government's Tibet policies. The monks of this monastery have learned harsh lessons. Before the fury of Chairman Mao's "cultural revolution" swept into this valley in 1966, more than 4,000 monks lived here. By the time the revolution burned out, 10 years later, there weren't even enough monks remaining to keep the monastery open. It reopened in the early 1980s, but there are still fewer than 2,000 monks in residence.

Days later, I am on a bus heading back over the mountains, toward home. A young monk swathed in crimson robes sits down beside me. He is, he explains, a student of Buddhist medicine at Labrang. We make small talk in broken Mandarin until he suddenly asks me whether I like the Dalai Lama.

I don't know much about him, I say, but he seems to be a good man. He smiles and nods.

"Have you ever seen him?"

"No, only on TV."

"Just once?"

"No, many times."

"Ah. . .you are lucky," he says softly.

As we reach his stop, he reaches into the folds of his robes and pulls out a business card. One side advertises his work in Tibetan, the other side in Chinese. And at the bottom of the card is his English name, Beckham. "My favourite football player," he winks as he goes.

The new world, it seems, is creeping in to Xiahe too. But, for now at least, this little corner may be the best place in China to connect with the past, and to offer a prayer for the New Year.

*****

Pack your bags

GETTING THERE

Take a train from Beijing (12 hours) or Shanghai (24 hours) to Lanzhou. From the city's West Bus Station, take a five-hour bus ride to Xiahe village. WHERE TO STAY

Overseas Tibetan Hotel: 77 Renmin, Xijie; 86 (941) 712 2642. The best choice in the village itself, with bright, comfortable rooms and a pleasant café on the ground floor.

Labrang Hotel: 86 (941) 712 1849. This is the luxury choice in Xiahe. Although a little far outside the village, guests here can enjoy quiet rooms and a pleasant 20-minute stroll along country paths to the monastery itself.

THINGS TO DO

Labrang Monastery: Guided tours in English depart twice a day. Enquire at the ticket office in the monastery.

Sangke Grasslands: Rent a bike or hire a local driver to take you on a tour of the grasslands, about 10 kilometres outside the village. Some of the farmers there may even welcome you into their houses for tea.

MEMORABLE MOMENT

Alarm clock Tibetan-style -- the visceral experience of wandering amid the mud-brick buildings of the monastery as droning horns and crashing gongs reverberated in the valley to wake the monks for morning prayers.

STRESS FACTOR

A lot of the buses to and from Xiahe leave only when they have a full complement of passengers, so drivers cruise around town for an hour or more trying to round up travellers.

SOUVENIR

The surprisingly high-tech business card of a Tibetan monk advertising his services as a herbalist and healer. He apparently carried them in the folds of his robes.