Potala Palace

The hill the palace stands on has been sacred longer than the palace itself. Tradition holds that in 637, Songtsen Gampo — the Tibetan king credited with unifying the plateau — built the first palace on this outcrop, known as Marpo Ri, or the Red Hill, to mark his marriage to the Chinese princess Wencheng. That original structure didn't survive: it was destroyed during the civil conflict that broke apart the Tibetan Tubo kingdom in the 9th century, and the hill sat largely bare of major construction for the better part of eight centuries.

What stands today began in 1645 under the Fifth Dalai Lama, and the pace of the two halves of the project tells its own story. The White Palace — the residential and administrative wing — went up remarkably fast, its exterior finished in about three years. The Red Palace, the religious heart of the complex devoted to the study of Buddhism and to the funerary stupas of past Dalai Lamas, took far longer: interior work and decoration stretched across roughly 45 years. The Fifth Dalai Lama died in 1682, over a decade before the Red Palace was finished in 1694, and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, kept the project moving to completion in his name.

Structurally, it's built in the dzong style typical of Tibetan fortress-monasteries: massive tapering stone and rammed-earth walls, wood-framed interiors, and a stepped silhouette that reads less like a single building than a fortified hill town. At an altitude of roughly 3,700 metres, the complex spans about 400 metres east to west, with the White Palace rising seven storeys and the Red Palace thirteen — a scale that made it, for centuries, one of the tallest and largest structures anywhere on the Tibetan plateau, and the winter seat of successive Dalai Lamas for three hundred years.

Getting there

Located in Lhasa. Lhasa Gonggar International Airport (LXA) is about 45 km away.