Tibetan chronicles, written centuries after the events they describe, tell that Bhrikuti was a daughter of the Licchavi ruling house of the Kathmandu Valley, given in marriage to Songtsen Gampo, the Tibetan king traditionally credited with unifying the Yarlung dynasty's territory into an early Tibetan empire. The marriage is usually dated to the 620s or early 630s, part of a wider pattern of the young Tibetan state building ties through royal marriage with its settled neighbors, since Songtsen Gampo also married a Chinese princess, Wencheng, in the same period.
The chronicles credit Bhrikuti with bringing Buddhist images and Newari craftsmen with her as part of her dowry, and with urging the construction of Lhasa's earliest Buddhist temples, most prominently the Jokhang, said to house a statue she brought from Nepal. The Red Palace on Marpo Ri, the hill later rebuilt by the Fifth Dalai Lama into the Potala, is likewise attributed in tradition to her wishes, built by the Nepali craftsmen in her retinue.
Modern historians treat the account cautiously. No source contemporary with the seventh century names her, and she is absent from the Dunhuang manuscripts, the most extensive independent documentation of early Tibetan royal history, which do mention Songtsen Gampo's Chinese marriage. Her story survives only in later Tibetan chronicles composed to explain and glorify the arrival of Buddhism in Tibet, which does not make the marriage untrue but does mean it cannot be confirmed against an outside record, and this atlas presents her historicity as unsettled rather than certain.