Lhasa

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They Hid a Death for Ten Years to Finish the Building

The Potala Palace holds the Guinness record for the highest-altitude palace in the world. It stands on Marpo Ri, the Red Hill, at about 3,700 metres above sea level, with the hill itself rising some 130 metres above the Lhasa valley floor.

The building is thirteen storeys and roughly 117 metres tall. It covers over 13 hectares, measures about 400 by 350 metres, and its sloping stone walls average three metres thick. Inside are over 1,000 rooms, around 10,000 shrines, and roughly 200,000 statues.

Construction of the present structure began in 1645 under the Fifth Dalai Lama — around the same years Shah Jahan was completing the Taj Mahal. The White Palace was finished within about three years. The Red Palace took until 1694.

And here is the part that belongs on a website about time.

The Fifth Dalai Lama died in 1682, twelve years before the Red Palace was completed. The monks overseeing the project judged that news of his death would cause the work to stop. So they did not release it.

They concealed the death for roughly ten years, until the building was finished.

A decade of official time in which the person the building was being built for was, as far as the record showed, still alive.

The clock: Lhasa's relationship with the hour is complicated in a quieter way.

The city sits at about 91° east, and runs on Beijing Time, UTC+8, which is calculated for the 120th meridian. That leaves Lhasa roughly two hours ahead of its own solar noon — the same structural gap that produces late sunrises across China's western half.

So the highest palace in the world, built over five decades on a hill in a valley at 3,700 metres, keeps a clock set for a coastline nearly four thousand kilometres east of it.

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