THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE PATOLA.
If you are among those of us who have wondered where the Dalai Lama calls
“home” when he is not exiled to some strange place elsewhere on Earth, his address is,
normally, “The Patola Palace” It is located high above the Lhasa Valley in Tibet, which is
about as remote as one can get other than Antarctica, I suppose.
The Patola is a old house. It’s been ”in the family” for many years and it has had -
some may say “suffered” - many additions and modifications over the centuries. The first
house to be built on a hill 170-meters above the Valley floor, which is, itself, high enough to
make things come to a boil slower in the kitchen., was finished in 637 A.D. It was palace,
really, but not much of it is evident in the present dwelling. It is said to have been used in
the foundations for subsequent erections. The Emperor Songtsen Gampo built the
dwelling on top of a hill which was said to have within it a sacred cavern. Therein dwelt
Bodhissartva Chenresi, so Emperor Gampol used it as Meditation Retreat. That original
building stood until the seventeenth century, oddly enough, at which time - in 1645,
during the region of the fifth Dalai Lama, it was obliterated. It took only a few years and
the “Potrang Karpo” - or “white house” - was completed. The next addition called the
“red house” or “Potrang Karpo” and it was added between 1690 and 1694.
You may wonder, as I did, how they managed to get their home improvement
work done so rapidly...three or four years ...when others took half a century, or more go get
things for occupancy. The Dalai Lama must have had a rather good relationships with
the labor union local of his time, because he used seven thousand “workers” plus and
one-thousand five hundred “artists” and “craftsmen” to make the place livable.
The latest revisions of any consequence were in 1922 when the 13th Dalai Lama
renovated some of the chapels and assembly halls in the White Palace and added two
more stories to the Red Palace section.
Fortunately, the three in one palace...counting the first house in the foundations...
suffered little damage during Tibetan uprisings again invading Chinese forces in the l960’s
and 70’s. It is said that Chou En Lai intervened personally to see that the relics of the
palace were not harmed. So, the chapels and the artifacts of the palace are reported to
be well preserved, even though the Dalai Lama is not “in residence”.
The multi-level construction called ”The Petola Palace is named after a holy place
in southern India called Mount Patola in southern India said to have been the abode of a
leading religious figure with a name longer than the mountain range It come to an end
with: ”Kuan Yin” for identification purposes herein. The Emperor Gampo, in the 7th
Century was regarded as an incarnation the Indian deity. It is likely it was he who named
his version of the palace “Petola” after the sacred mountain.
When the Dalai Lams ruled Tibet the Palace was a busy place. It’s 130,000 square
meter interior housed the Tibetan Government, the Dalai Lama’s large staff, a training
school for Monks and a special shrine housed in one ot the White Palace’s two impressive
chapels which lured thousands of Tibetan pilgrims to the holy shrine each day.
Photographs of the palace seldom do it justice, I feel. Often the whole
accumulation seems ready to come scudding down the steep mountain side in a mix of
red and white mortar. But, to the Dalai Lama, wherever he may be tonight.... be it ever
so tumbly, there’s no place like Patola.
A.L.M. July 27, 2002 [c635wds]
