Dusum Khyenpa founded Tsurphu in 1189, late in a long teaching life that had already made him one of the most respected meditation masters of his generation. What made the monastery historically significant was recognized after his death: his students identified a child as his conscious rebirth, and that recognition became the first tulku succession in Tibetan Buddhism, a model of deliberately identified reincarnate teachers that the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama lineages, among others, would later adopt.
The Karmapas who succeeded Dusum Khyenpa at Tsurphu built the Karma Kagyu school into one of the major traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, associated with the black ceremonial hat that gives the lineage its popular name in the West and with a body of teaching on meditation and the nature of mind transmitted from master to recognized successor across eight centuries.
The Cultural Revolution reached Tolung valley in the 1960s and left Tsurphu largely in ruins. Reconstruction began in the 1980s under a changed political climate that allowed limited religious rebuilding, and the monastery slowly regained working temples and a resident monastic community, though at a fraction of its former scale.
The seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, was enthroned at the rebuilt Tsurphu in 1992 as a child, recognized jointly by the Dalai Lama and Chinese authorities. He resided there through the 1990s before leaving Tibet at the end of 1999 in an unannounced journey to India, after which Tsurphu continued as a functioning monastery under a Karmapa who has not returned to it.