Tsurphu's first article says the Cultural Revolution left the monastery largely in ruins; what was actually destroyed there was deliberate and specific rather than incidental. Three large stupas inside the main temple, holding relics of successive Kagyu teachers, and a set of statues depicting every Karmapa up to the tenth were torn down by hand, methodically, with dynamite used only on the largest single image, the Lachen statue, when hand demolition proved insufficient. Almost nothing of the pre 1959 monastery survived standing.
Reconstruction began only when China's border with Nepal reopened to older Tibetans in the early 1980s. The sixteenth Karmapa, already in exile, sent his own representative, Drupon Dechen Rinpoche, back into Tibet specifically to rebuild Tsurphu, and physical work started there in 1980 under his direction, continuing after the sixteenth Karmapa's own death the following year. The monastery visitors see today, its assembly hall, its residential quarters, its smaller shrine rooms, dates almost entirely from that 1980s campaign forward rather than from any earlier century.
The rebuilt assembly hall now houses a funeral chorten containing the sixteenth Karmapa's own relics, a memorial built into the same reconstruction it commemorates. Tsurphu today supports a resident community of roughly three hundred seventy monks, with another fifty or so living in retreat in the surrounding mountains, a fraction of its pre destruction size but a functioning monastic community nonetheless, sustained by a reconstruction that had to rebuild its relics as well as its walls.