Potala Palace
— — the white wall the morning warms first.
Not only on a wall.
“Thirteen stories of whitewashed stone and crimson timber on the ridge above the Lhasa valley. The White Palace was finished in 1648, the Red Palace some forty years later, and pilgrims have walked the kora around its base every dawn since. From below it looks painted onto the hill. From the river road it looks like the hill grew up to meet it. The air at 3,700 metres thins everything — colour, sound, the distance between one terrace and the next. from the studio
Potala Palace, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Potala Palace sits on Marpori, the Red Hill, on the north side of the Lhasa valley in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Construction began in 1645 under the Fifth Dalai Lama, Lobsang Gyatso, on the site of an earlier seventh-century fort attributed to Songtsen Gampo. The White Palace was completed in 1648 and the Red Palace around 1694. The complex rises thirteen stories above the hill, holds more than a thousand rooms, and reaches roughly 3,700 metres above sea level. It served as the seat of Tibetan government and the winter residence of successive Dalai Lamas, and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1994.
The walls are rammed earth and stone, three metres thick at the base, brushed every year before Losar with a wash of lime mixed with milk, sugar, and honey. The Red Palace is finished in a deep iron-rich ochre made from a powder used across Tibetan monastic architecture. Inside, more than 200,000 statues and around 10,000 painted chapels and shrines line the corridors. The Fifth Dalai Lama's funerary stupa in the Red Palace stands about 14.85 metres tall and is wrapped in roughly 3,700 kilograms of gold. The carpentry uses interlocking timber brackets sized to flex through small Himalayan earthquakes rather than resist them.
Foreign visitors enter Tibet on a Tibet Travel Permit arranged through a licensed agency, in addition to a Chinese visa, and tour the palace as part of a guided itinerary. Entry to the palace itself is by timed ticket, with a daily quota that tightens sharply in the summer pilgrimage months. Inside, visitors follow a one-way route and are typically held to about an hour to protect the painted chapels. The climb from the south gate to the upper terraces gains roughly 130 metres on stone stairs at altitude, so most travellers spend two or three days in Lhasa first to acclimatise.