The hill and its name
The Red Hill rises from the Lhasa valley about a kilometre and a half west of the Jokhang, the city's oldest temple. Tibetan tradition holds that the seventh-century emperor Songtsen Gampo built a palace on it, and a small chapel within the present building is identified with that early structure. The name Potala comes from Potalaka, the mountain abode of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, of whom the Dalai Lamas are held to be emanations.
The Fifth Dalai Lama
In 1642 the Gelug school, with the military backing of the Khoshut Mongol ruler Gushri Khan, defeated the kings of Tsang, and the Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, became the ruler of Tibet. In 1645 he began a palace on the Red Hill to serve as the seat of his government. The White Palace, the eastern part that held the living quarters and offices, was ready in 1648, when he moved in.
The Fifth Dalai Lama died in 1682. His regent, Sangye Gyatso, concealed the death for some fifteen years, saying that the Dalai Lama had gone into long retreat, while he completed the Red Palace, the central block that rises above the white wings. The Red Palace holds the assembly halls and chapels, and the great gilded stupa-tomb of the Fifth Dalai Lama. The deception came to light in 1697, when the Sixth Dalai Lama, already chosen in secret, was enthroned.
The building
The palace rises some thirteen storeys up the hill, with sloping walls of stone and rammed earth up to several metres thick, and contains more than a thousand rooms. The white walls are whitewashed each year, and the red of the central block is a colour reserved for religious buildings. The roofs of the chapels and tombs are gilded. Inside are thousands of images, murals and painted scrolls, and a library of scriptures. The tombs of the Fifth Dalai Lama and of the Seventh to the Thirteenth stand inside it as gilded stupas; the Sixth, who died in Mongol custody far from Lhasa, has none.
Seat of government
From the late seventeenth century the Potala was the centre of the Tibetan state: the Dalai Lama spent the winter here, and the government's offices, a school for monk officials, a treasury and a prison were housed in or below it. The summer was spent at the Norbulingka, a palace and park built in the eighteenth century on the outskirts of the city.
In March 1959, after an uprising in Lhasa against Chinese rule, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama left the Norbulingka in disguise and escaped to India. The Potala was shelled in the fighting that followed but was not seriously damaged. During the Cultural Revolution it was protected, according to many accounts on the order of Zhou Enlai, while many other Tibetan monasteries were destroyed.
Today
The Potala is now a state museum. Its listing by UNESCO in 1994 was followed by large-scale restoration funded by the Chinese government. The surrounding district has been redeveloped, and access to the building is limited by quotas. For Tibetans in exile and many in Tibet it remains the symbol of the Dalai Lama's absent government.
Further reading
- Snellgrove, David. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Serindia, 1987
- Lopez, Donald S. The Story of Buddhism. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001
- Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism. Cambridge University Press, 2013
See also
- Tibet — Tibet is a high-plateau region of Inner Asia, home to the seventh-to-ninth-century Tibetan Empire and to Tibetan Buddhist civilization, ruled after 1642 by the Dalai Lamas' Ganden Phodrang government and administered since the 1950s by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region.
- Vajrayana — Vajrayana is the tantric development of Mahayana Buddhism, using mantra, visualisation, ritual and initiation to pursue buddhahood by an accelerated path, dominant in Tibet and Himalayan Buddhism.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.