The Potala Palace: Remembering to Forget in Contemporary Tibet

Abstract

Apart from the Taj Mahal, few historic structures can compete with the iconic potency of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Both of these seventeenth-century edifices appear to fulfil one of the basic requirements for a monument: they are dedicated to the commemoration of an absent person. But whereas the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan deliberately set out to create a ravishing mausoleum for his wife, the Potala has only become a monument since 1959, when the fourteenth Dalai Lama fled Tibet and sought exile in India. As the supreme embodiment of the Tibetan cause travelling the world in its pursuit, the Dalai Lama's mobility contrasts greatly with the stubborn immovability of his palace: a place which for many Tibetans stands as a painful memorial to his absence from the ‘homeland’. This essay considers the transformation of the Potala from its previous role as the residence of the Dalai Lamas, the institutional heart of Tibetan Buddhism, and the administrative base of the Tibetan government into an empty shell that is now emphatically the property of the People's Republic of China. I argue that in contemporary Tibet monumentalisation has less to do with eliciting memory than with a state-led agenda of organised forgetting.