Lhasa

Songtsen Gampo unified the Tibetan plateau in the first half of the seventh century and made Lhasa, then a marshy valley site, his capital. Tibetan tradition credits him with founding the Jokhang temple to house a revered image of the Buddha, the Jowo Shakyamuni, brought to the city as part of a royal marriage, and the temple has remained the most sacred site in Tibetan Buddhism ever since. The Barkhor, the circular route that pilgrims walk clockwise around the Jokhang, still draws worshippers prostrating the full circuit, some of them arriving after journeys of weeks across the plateau.

The dynasty Songtsen Gampo founded oversaw Tibet's adoption of Buddhism as a state religion, layered over the older Bon tradition, and Lhasa grew as the plateau's religious center through the centuries that followed, eventually becoming closely associated with the Gelug school, the "Yellow Hat" tradition that would come to dominate Tibetan religious and political life. The city's name, commonly read as "place of the gods," reflects the density of temples and monasteries that grew up around the Jokhang over the following thousand years.

Lhasa's rise as Tibet's preeminent religious center deepened in the early fifteenth century, when the reformer Tsongkhapa and his disciples founded three great Gelug monasteries just outside the city, Ganden, Drepung and Sera, known collectively as the Three Great Seats. At their height they housed tens of thousands of monks between them and functioned as the tradition's main centers of monastic study, feeding scholars and administrators into the religious government that would later be centered on the Potala.

The fifth Dalai Lama, who consolidated Gelug religious authority into direct political rule over Tibet in the mid seventeenth century, began building the Potala Palace on Marpo Ri, the Red Hill, above the city in 1645, raising it over the remains of an earlier fortress. The finished palace combined a White Palace, holding the machinery of government, with a Red Palace of chapels and the funerary stupas of successive Dalai Lamas, and it functioned as both residence and seat of government for the next three centuries.

Tibetan Buddhism developed its own institution for continuing that leadership across generations: on a Dalai Lama's death, senior lamas search for a child recognized, through signs, divination and testing against the deceased lama's possessions, as his reincarnation, a process traditionally consulting the sacred lake Lhamo Latso. The fourteenth Dalai Lama, recognized as a child in the 1930s, ruled from the Potala until March 1959, when a popular uprising against Chinese administration was suppressed and he fled to exile in India, where the Tibetan government he leads has continued to operate since. Lhasa remains under Chinese administration as capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the Potala, no longer a seat of government, now functions as a museum and pilgrimage site.