What is Onkor Festival?

This is a festival when Tibetans celebrating harvest. "On" in Tibetan means fields, "kor" means circle around. Onkor means circle around fields. The festival is popular in all farming areas, no fixed date, generally it is celebrated when the crops ripen.

Onkor Festival, with a history over 1500 years was primitively popular in the middle and lower reaches of Yarlung Tsangpo valley. The activity of Onkor, at the beginning, was a sacrifice ritual to deity spirits for praying a bumper harvest. Usually it was organized in units of a village and headed by wizard of Bon religion who received spirits of earth to do a circle around its field. At the end of the eighth century, Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism was prevailing. Onkor Festival affected by Nyingmapa's ritual was imperative to have incantation to pray for a harvest. Since forteenth century, Gelugpa sect had dominated power in Tibet so Onkor Festival has adopted Gelugpa's ritual as they would hold Buddha sculptures and chant scriptures before parade. From then on, Onkor Festval became a fixed a Tibetan Festival. Horse racing, archery, and performance of Tibetan operas had been gradually added to the activities of the Festival. For the time being, men, women, young and old all dressed in their new clothes, carrying a harvest tower made of qingke barley and grain particles, playing drums and singing to circle around their fields to celebrate it. On this very day, besides horse racing, archery, singing and dancing, people also have picnics in suburbs.

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