Gendun Drup, a monk of humble background who by some accounts had herded animals as a child before entering monastic life, founded Tashilhunpo at Shigatse in 1447, late in a career that had already made him a respected teacher within the newly formed Gelug school founded by his own teacher, Je Tsongkhapa. Gendun Drup could not have known he would later be recognized, after his death, as the first in a lineage his own tradition would call the Dalai Lamas, a title first applied two rebirths later. Tashilhunpo remained tied to that identification even as the lineage's seat moved eventually to Lhasa.
The monastery's own reincarnate lineage, the Panchen Lamas, was established later, when the fifth Dalai Lama recognized his own teacher, already an elderly abbot of Tashilhunpo, as the fourth in a line traced to Gendun Drup's own contemporaries. Tradition holds each Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama plays a customary role in recognizing the other's reincarnation.
That reciprocal system met open crisis after the tenth Panchen Lama's death in 1989. In 1995 the fourteenth Dalai Lama, from exile in India, announced his recognition of a six year old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the eleventh Panchen Lama. Chinese authorities rejected that recognition, took the boy into what they described as protective custody, and he has not appeared in public since. Authorities instead installed a different child, Gyaincain Norbu, at Tashilhunpo, a choice much of the exile Tibetan community does not accept.
Tashilhunpo continues to function as a large working monastery regardless of that unresolved dispute, home to a monastic community and a gilded statue of the future Buddha Maitreya among the largest of its kind, predating the controversy by centuries.