Potala Palace

For roughly fifteen years, a regent in Lhasa answered questions about a man who was no longer alive. The Fifth Dalai Lama died in 1682, with the second half of his palace still unbuilt and the government he had assembled only a few decades old. His regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, decided not to announce it. The official line was that the ruler had entered a long retreat and could not be disturbed. Decisions went out in his name. Envoys were turned away politely. Some accounts say a stand-in appeared at a distance during certain ceremonies. Meanwhile the masons kept working, and the death was made public only in the 1690s, once the building was standing.

A Hill With A Long History Of Being Occupied

The Tibetan name of the hill is Marpo Ri, the Red Hill. It rises abruptly out of the flat floor of the Lhasa valley, which makes it the obvious place for anyone trying to hold the valley. Tibetan tradition puts a fort or palace here in the seventh century, in the time of Songtsen Gampo. Very little of that structure survives; fire and fighting emptied the hilltop more than once over the following centuries.

The building people photograph today was begun in 1645. Lhasa had just become the seat of government again, and the new administration needed three things at once: somewhere to live, somewhere defensible, and somewhere to hold religious ceremonies. Rather than build three buildings, they stacked all three into one. That decision, more than any ambition about size, is why the Potala is the shape it is.

The White Palace, Potrang Karpo, went up first and held the administration and the living quarters. The Red Palace, Potrang Marpo, came later and was given over entirely to religious use. The two colours are not decoration; they are a legend you can read from the far side of the valley.

Building Where Nothing Grows

Almost nothing about the site is convenient. The Lhasa valley sits at roughly 3,700 metres, trees are scarce, and the quarry was not at the top of the hill. Stone, earth and mortar had to come up the slope, and past a certain gradient pack animals were no help, so it moved on people's backs in baskets, for decades. Timber for the beams and pillars was hauled in from distant valleys, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, which is why the interior treats wood as something precious rather than something structural to be spent freely.

The walls are stone and rammed earth, several metres thick at the base and tapering as they rise. The inward batter is not a style choice: it is how a very tall masonry wall survives in a seismically active region, since the weight leans back into the hill instead of pushing outward. There is a persistent story that molten copper was poured into the foundations as an anti-earthquake measure, but no excavation record confirms it.

Counted as thirteen storeys, the interior changes function as it climbs. Storerooms, granaries, treasuries and archives sit at the bottom. Above them come assembly halls, libraries and corridors covered in wall paintings, and above those the residential floors and roof terraces. The circulation inside is far more tangled than the flat, symmetrical façade suggests.

What The Red Palace Is Actually For

The Red Palace is, in the end, a tomb. Several Dalai Lamas are interred there in stupa-shaped funerary monuments, and the largest of them, the Fifth's, is so tall that it passes through more than one floor of the building. It is sheathed in gold and set with precious stones. The halls around it are close to windowless, so almost all the light comes from long rows of butter lamps. Centuries of that soot have laid a film over the murals, and removing it without removing the paint underneath is one of the more stubborn conservation problems in the building.

The palace is also an archive: thangka collections, manuscripts and administrative records that span the whole life of the institution. Part of what has kept the structure standing is simply an unbroken habit of repair. Nothing wooden lasts four hundred years at this altitude unless every generation does its share.

Now

The Potala served as the winter residence of the Dalai Lamas, with Norbulingka to the west of the city as the summer one. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama left Lhasa for India in 1959, and nobody has lived in the building since. It was turned into a museum and largely escaped the destruction that reached many monasteries in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution.

It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1994, with the listing later extended to include the Jokhang Temple and Norbulingka. Daily visitor numbers are capped now and time inside is limited by ticket, partly to spare the wooden staircases and partly because crowds bring in moisture. The other worries are foundation settlement, insect damage in the beams, and a city that has grown right up to the base of the hill. The building has been on that hill for four centuries. The only constant is that someone keeps repairing it.