Potala Palace Liberation Army Of Tibet

Is it necessary to describe Potala Palace? This great piece of architecture, like a thousand beams of light illuminating the ancient city of Lhasa, is seen as the symbol of Tibet by people throughout the world. Straddling the peak of Marpo Ri at the center of the Lhasa Valley, whether by its appearance or in the eye of the beholder, it holds an irresistible attraction.At the beginning of the 20th century, an English correspondent who entered the rooftop of the world with armed troops invading Tibet, on seeing Potala Palace from a distance “like flames shining brilliantly under the sun,” sighed with emotion, “This is not a palace sitting on top of a mountain; it is a mountain of a palace.”

 The history of Potala Palace extends over a millennia. One thousand three hundred years ago, Potala Palace had already taken on its citadel shape during the period of Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo. In 1642, the Fifth Dalai Lama established the Ganden Phodang authority and unified the country, becoming the highest religious and secular leader in all of Tibet. Another of his great achievements was to build the Potala Palace on the site where (according to Buddhist sutras) Avalokites ´vara preached his sermons. Since then, the magnificent Potala has been the political and religious center of Tibetan theocracy, and its sacred status lasted until 1959.

Once upon a time this song was written and became popular among Tibetans:
On the golden roof of the Potala, rises the golden sun It is not the golden sun, but the precious face of the Lama On the slopes of the Potala, starts the sound of the golden oboe It is not the sound of the golden oboe, but the voice of the Lama chanting At the foot of the Potala, multi-hued khatak are fluttering They are notmulti-hued khatak, but the robes of the Lama.

It is obvious to everyone that the Lama glorified in the song is none other than the Dalai Lama, for Tibetans the embodiment of Avalokites´vara,worshipped by Tibetans living in the snow land. But then, 1959 arrived. Late in the night of March 17, the Dalai Lama was forced to escape fromanother of his palaces, the Norbulingka. Two days later, in themidst of unprecedented shelling of Lhasa, the Norbulingka and Potala Palace were turned into killing fields, silent witnesses to this earthshaking event in Tibetan history.A soldier fromthe People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who took part in“pacifying armed rebels in Tibet” recalls that the PLA’s 308th Artillery Regiment,which had been stationed for years at the foot of Bumpa Ri on the far bank of the Lhasa River, had long been targeting several howitzers at Potala Palace.

So finally, during the “pacification of the rebellion,” every single shell was shot precisely through the red-framed windows edged in black and exploded inside the palace. Yet a one-time “rebellious villain” of that era recalls that they gave up on their resistance because they could just no longer bear those demon-like shells damaging the Potala. Therefore, in some surviving photos and documentaries we can see “rebellious villains”walking down fromthe smoke-blackened Potala, holding white khatak above them, to surrender their weapons to the Liberation Army who was “liberating”Tibet. (Actually, this scene was filmed after the “pacifying rebellion”; those captives who weremarched back to the Potala to reenact the scene were then all thrown in jail.)

  
Potala Palace has been an empty building since then. In the years that followed, the Potala was no longer the center of Lhasa; it has been turned into a backdrop by the occupiers of each period and for each situation. It is a backdrop of unlimited interest, a must-have backdrop, but also a backdrop that is a mystery to people. The Potala has never been, with the changing of time and space, so colorful, so odd, and even so helpless and sad, as it has been during this last half century.