Potala Palace

The Potala Palace rises in tiers of white and red walls over Marpo Ri, the Red Hill, in the centre of the Lhasa valley in Tibet, now part of China. Begun in 1645 by the Fifth Dalai Lama on the site of a seventh-century royal palace, it was both the winter residence of the Dalai Lamas and the seat of the Tibetan government from 1649 until 1959. It has since been a museum, and its fate mirrors Tibet's own passage from a Buddhist state to Chinese rule.

Tradition holds that in 637 Songtsen Gampo, ruler of the rising Tibetan Empire, raised the first buildings on the hill after moving his capital to Lhasa. Two chapels in the north-west of the present palace are said to preserve parts of that earlier structure, including a cave identified as the king's meditation retreat. The palace takes its name from Mount Potalaka, the mythical home of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, regarded as the divine prototype of the Dalai Lamas. After the empire collapsed in the ninth century, political power in Tibet lay elsewhere for centuries, though Lhasa remained a great religious centre.

In 1642 the Khoshut Mongol ruler Güshi Khan defeated the rulers of Tsang and handed authority over Tibet to the Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso. The new government, known as the Ganden Phodrang, made Lhasa its capital. On the advice of his teacher Konchog Chophel, who noted the hill's position between the great monasteries of Drepung and Sera and the old city, the Dalai Lama began the present palace in 1645. The outer shell of the White Palace took about three years, and the Dalai Lama and his government moved in during 1649; fitting out the interior took decades more.

The Fifth Dalai Lama died in 1682, but his regent Desi Sangye Gyatso kept the death secret for some fifteen years, reportedly so that the palace could be finished and neighbouring powers would not exploit a gap in the succession. The Red Palace, which holds the principal halls and chapels and the shrines of past Dalai Lamas, was added between 1690 and 1694. The finished complex measures about 400 metres east to west and 350 metres north to south. Its sloping stone walls average three metres thick, and it rises thirteen storeys, around 119 metres above the hill, holding more than a thousand rooms and, by one count, some 200,000 statues.

Qing troops entered Lhasa in 1720, and the Manchu court stationed commissioners, the ambans, in the city. After a riot in 1750 the Qianlong Emperor reorganised the Tibetan government. From the late eighteenth century the Dalai Lamas spent summers at the new Norbulingka palace to the west and winters in the Potala. In 1904 a British expedition under Francis Younghusband occupied Lhasa after the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had fled, and the last Chinese troops left the city in 1912.

People's Liberation Army forces defeated Tibetan troops at Chamdo in October 1950, and an agreement with Beijing followed in 1951. In 1959, during the failed Tibetan uprising, Chinese shells struck the palace and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India. The government then converted the Potala into a museum. During the Cultural Revolution the building itself was spared, reportedly through the personal intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai, but the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser has written that its stores of scriptures and treasures were almost completely emptied.

UNESCO inscribed the Potala as a World Heritage Site in 1994, and later extended the listing to take in the Jokhang Temple and, in 2001, the Norbulingka. Restoration was carried out between 1989 and 1994, and again from 2002. UNESCO has voiced concern about modern buildings close to the palace and about restoration materials; Chinese authorities responded with a 21-metre height limit nearby, and the palace's director said only traditional materials and techniques were used. Visitor numbers have been capped since 2003, and pressure grew after the railway to Lhasa opened in 2006.