Potala Palace

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The Potala Palace is the great fortress-palace and monastery that stands on Marpori, the Red Hill, above Lhasa in central Tibet — for three centuries the winter residence and the administrative seat of the Dalai Lamas, and one of the principal sacred sites of Tibetan Buddhism. Its name derives from Potalaka, the mythic mountain home of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, whom the Dalai Lamas are held to embody. The building is thus a claim in stone: that the hill is the bodhisattva’s mountain made present.

A fortress is said to have stood on the same height in the seventh century, raised by Songtsen Gampo, the king credited with bringing Buddhism into Tibet. Little of that early structure survives, and the standing complex is far younger. The present palace was begun in 1645 under the Fifth Dalai Lama, the figure who unified Tibet under the Geluk school and established the Dalai Lamas’ temporal rule. The lower White Palace, housing the government offices and the lama’s apartments, was finished within a few years; the upper Red Palace, given over to chapels, assembly halls, and the funerary stūpas of the Dalai Lamas, rose over the following decades. Much of it was completed after the Fifth Dalai Lama’s death — a death his regent is recorded to have concealed for years, so the work could go on undisturbed.

Government and devotion were not separate functions here but one. The Potala held the seat of the Tibetan state, the apartments of its ruler, and the tombs and shrines through which that ruler was venerated as a living emanation of Avalokiteśvara; monks, ministers, and pilgrims moved through the same walls. The golden stūpas of the Red Palace, several sheathed in metal and set with turquoise and coral, enclose the embalmed bodies of past Dalai Lamas and remain objects of pilgrimage. The structure that survives — over a dozen storeys, more than a thousand rooms by the usual count — is among the largest works of traditional Tibetan architecture.

The Potala ceased to be a working seat of government in 1959, when the fourteenth Dalai Lama left Tibet during the uprising against Chinese rule; it has since been preserved as a museum and, since 1994, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For Tibetan Buddhists it remains a place of pilgrimage and a symbol of an exiled office, at once a monument open to visitors and a site whose meaning is bound to a political dispute still unresolved. What the walls were built to assert — that compassion had taken a seat on the hill above Lhasa — they go on asserting, emptied of the figure they were raised to house.

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