Dratang Monastery, Buddhist monastery in Zhanang County, China

Dratang Monastery stands in Zhatang Town, Zhanang County, with its three-storey main hall facing east inside a now incomplete elliptical outer wall about 750 metres around. Only the ground floor of the hall and fragments of the walls remain. Inside, the central chapel keeps 11th-century murals of the Buddha preaching, framed by scrolling foliage and flanked by crowned, haloed figures.

Dratang Monastery was founded in 1081 by the monk Drapa Ngonshe, who died in 1090 before work finished; his nephews completed it in 1093. In the mid-13th century, under Sakya rule, it was converted to the Sakya school. It was badly damaged during the Mongol Dzungar invasion and fully restored in the 1930s under the Fifth Reting Rinpoche. In 1996 it became a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level.

The monastery's name, Angdan Dratang, means "five excellences of Dratang", referring to five features its founder claimed Samye Monastery lacked, such as a ground-floor circumambulation corridor one bow (0.9 m) wider. The main hall's upper galleries carry portraits of Sakya masters, each figure turned toward the central shrine and grouped in threes.

The monastery stands in Zhatang Town, Zhanang County, Shannan, about 150 km by road from Lhasa. Only the main hall's ground floor and fragments of the outer wall survive; the ground floor was used as a grain store until 1984 and repairs began in 1995. The main hall faces east, and the 11th-century murals are in the central Buddha chapel.

The ground-floor Buddha hall keeps ten 11th-century murals of Shakyamuni preaching, ringed by bodhisattvas, disciples and donors, with flowers and lions between the figures. Tibetan scholars consider them the oldest and best-preserved wall paintings of the early period of the later spread of Buddhism in Tibet.