Moxi Village and Tibetan Catholic Church

Moxi is the gateway town for Hailuogou, a small village at around 1,800 metres that sits noticeably below the plateau altitude and enjoys a milder climate than the surrounding high country. The town itself is modest — some guesthouses, restaurants, and the usual souvenir trade — but it contains one genuinely unexpected sight: a Tibetan Catholic church dating from the late nineteenth century, built by French missionaries and still in active use.

The church is a distinctive building: clearly Catholic in its architectural intent, with a bell tower and cross, but built in local Tibetan stone and sitting in a landscape of yak pastures and snowpeaks. The Sunday morning service attracts the local Tibetan Catholic community, and the contrast of familiar liturgical forms in this setting is one of those travellers' discoveries that resists easy description. The church is generally unlocked during the day and visitors are welcome to look inside.

Moxi also serves as the base for acclimatising before the park — the altitude here is considerably lower than the glacier and one night in Moxi before ascending helps with the transition. The Luding suspension bridge, a historic site from the Long March, is about 45 kilometres down the valley toward Kangding.

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A story
French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Mission Society reached this remote valley in the 1880s and established a church that survived for over a century in one of the most isolated corners of Sichuan. The Catholic presence spread across the Kham borderlands, and several churches in the area were built and destroyed and rebuilt multiple times. The Moxi church has survived because the local Tibetan Catholic community — a few hundred people — maintained it continuously. They have practiced a form of Christianity that coexists with local Tibetan customs in ways that no ecclesiastical authority ever entirely approved of.