Who ruled Lhasa?

Lhasa lies in the valley of the Kyi Chu, a tributary of the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra), on the Tibetan Plateau at about 3,650 metres above sea level. Its name means "place of the gods". The valley is one of the more sheltered and fertile in central Tibet, and the city grew around a temple rather than a market or fortress. For most of its history Lhasa has been above all the holy city of Tibetan Buddhism, and from 1642 it was also the seat of the Dalai Lamas' government. Its modern history is bound up with the contested relationship between Tibet and China.

In the 7th century Songtsen Gampo, ruler of the expanding Tibetan Empire, moved his court from the Yarlung Valley to the site of Lhasa and built a fortress on the Red Hill, where the Potala now stands. Tradition says his two foreign wives, a Nepalese princess and the Chinese princess Wencheng of the Tang dynasty, brought sacred Buddha images, and that the Jokhang and Ramoche temples were built to house them. The Jokhang, ringed by the Barkhor pilgrim circuit, became the spiritual heart of Tibet. The empire collapsed in the mid-9th century, and for some 800 years political power lay elsewhere, with rival princes, monasteries and, in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Sakya lamas who ruled Tibet under the patronage of the Mongol Yuan emperors.

Lhasa's religious importance revived in the early 15th century with the reformer Tsongkhapa, who founded the great Monlam prayer festival at the Jokhang in 1409. His followers, the Gelug school, built the three huge monasteries of Ganden, Drepung and Sera in and near the city, which grew into some of the largest monastic communities in the world.

In 1642 the 5th Dalai Lama, backed by the army of the Mongol ruler Güshi Khan, became the political as well as spiritual leader of Tibet and made Lhasa his capital. From 1645 he rebuilt the Potala as a vast palace and government centre, which was completed with the Red Palace in the 1690s. Lhasa became a meeting place for traders from Nepal, Kashmir, Mongolia, China and India. In 1720 the armies of the Qing dynasty entered the city, and from then on the Qing stationed imperial representatives, the ambans, and a garrison there, though the extent of their real authority varied over time.

In August 1904 a British expedition under Francis Younghusband fought its way to Lhasa and imposed a treaty on the officials left in charge, the 13th Dalai Lama having already escaped north. Following the fall of the Qing in 1911 to 1912, Tibetans expelled the Chinese garrison, and the 13th Dalai Lama returned to rule Tibet as a state that operated independently until 1950. The Republic of China continued to claim Tibet as part of its territory, and Tibetan independence won little formal international recognition.

In 1950 the People's Liberation Army defeated Tibetan forces at Chamdo, and in 1951 Tibetan delegates signed the Seventeen Point Agreement in Beijing; Chinese troops entered Lhasa later that year. China describes these events as the peaceful liberation of Tibet, while the Tibetan government in exile and many historians describe them as an invasion and annexation. In March 1959 an uprising in Lhasa was crushed, and the 14th Dalai Lama fled to India, where he set up a government in exile. Lhasa became the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China in 1965. Many religious buildings were damaged during the Cultural Revolution, and protests against Chinese rule broke out in the late 1980s and again in March 2008. The railway from Qinghai, opened in 2006, has brought rapid growth, tourism and Han Chinese migration.

The urban district now has around 460,000 people. The Potala Palace, the Jokhang and the Norbulingka summer palace are listed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.