Notas del episodio
The Potala Palace rises on Marpo Ri, the Red Hill, about 3,700 meters up in the Lhasa Valley, named for Mount Potalaka, home of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. In the seventh century the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo kept a meditation cave there, the Chogyal Drupuk, which was absorbed into the later building. After the Mongol leader Gushri Khan gave the Fifth Dalai Lama secular control of Tibet in 1642, the Dalai Lama began the palace in 1645 on a site chosen by his counselor between the Sera and Drepung monasteries. Builders raised 13 stories of inward-sloping dzong walls up to five meters thick in about three years and poured molten copper between the foundation stones to ride out earthquakes.
The interior took 45 years and was finished in 1694, 12 years after the Fifth Dalai Lama died, with Newari metalworkers from Nepal and master artisans creating some 10,000 shrines and 200,000 statues. The White Palace held government and living quarters, the Red Palace the chapels and tombs, and from 1649 to 1959 locals simply called it the Peak. Artillery hit the palace in the 1959 uprising, and Zhou Enlai sent troops to protect it during the Cultural Revolution, though historian Tsering Woeser says it was almost robbed empty. It became a UNESCO site in 1994, and after the 2006 railway to Lhasa, crowds of up to 6,000 a day forced strict quotas.
- How huge bellows-driven kilns reached copper-melting heat in the thin air at 12,000 feet
- Three-dimensional Kalachakra and Yamantaka mandalas built from gilded metal, gems, and wood
- Giant silk thangkas of Tara and Shakyamuni Buddha unrolled down the white southern wall during festivals
- The Chinese character for long life on the Dalai Lama's throne and the diplomacy of Qing dynasty gifts
- A 21 meter height limit on nearby buildings and a rooftop ban as footsteps now threaten the floors