The Potala Palace, in 3D and in Minecraft

The Potala Palace climbs the Red Hill in Lhasa in thirteen storeys of sloping whitewashed walls, with the deep red Red Palace at its centre and golden roofs on top. For three centuries it was the house of the Dalai Lamas and the seat of Tibet’s government. Here is how it was built, why it is red and white, what the 3D model of it shows, and how to download it for Minecraft.

Where

The Red Hill (Marpo Ri), Lhasa, Tibet

Built

1645–94, on a 7th-century site

Height

About 117 m, in 13 storeys

Rooms

More than 1,000

Altitude

About 3,700 m above sea level

World Heritage Site

Since 1994

A palace on the Red Hill

The first palace on the hill is traditionally credited to Songtsen Gampo, the 7th-century king who made Lhasa the capital of Tibet. Tradition describes a great walled complex of 999 rooms, with one more on the peak. Little of it survives, but two chapels from that palace are inside the present building: the Chogyal Drubphuk, the king’s meditation cave, and the Phakpa Lhakhang. Britannica calls them the most sacred rooms in the Potala.

The name is probably taken from Mount Potalaka, the mythical home of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, whose incarnation the Dalai Lama is regarded to be.

The Great Fifth’s palace, 1645–94

The palace you see today was the work of the 5th Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, known as the Great Fifth. In 1642, with the backing of the Mongol ruler Gushri Khan, he became the temporal as well as the religious ruler of Tibet, and in 1645 he ordered a palace-fortress to match. The hill was easy to defend, Lhasa was already a centre of pilgrimage, and the three great monasteries of his Gelug school stood nearby.

The White Palace took just three years. It was finished in 1648, the Dalai Lama moved in from Drepung Monastery, and from then on the Potala was the residence of the Dalai Lamas and the seat of their government.

The Great Fifth died in 1682. His regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, kept the death secret for years, and the Manchu court was told only in 1694 or 1696; sources differ. The Red Palace was begun in 1690 as his memorial and to house his funeral stupa, and was finished in 1694. Later Dalai Lamas added stupa halls of their own, the last, for the 13th Dalai Lama, in the 1930s.

Why the Potala is red and white

The two colours say what each part was for. The White Palace, spreading across both wings, held the offices of government, the great ceremonial halls and, on its top floor, the Dalai Lama’s own rooms. The Red Palace, higher up and in the centre, is the religious heart of the building: chapels, scripture halls and the gilded tombs of the Dalai Lamas.

The white is not paint in the usual sense. A 2026 study of the walls found a wash of local clay mixed with milk and sugar, splashed on by hand and renewed every year after the rainy season; Chinese state media describe a mixture of milk, honey, sugar and lime. Either way the drips it leaves are part of the look. You will also read that white stands for peace and red for power; no authoritative source supports that.

Turn it round here

Interactive 3D model

the Potala Palace

The model shows the palace on its hill: the whitewashed wings, the Red Palace with its gold-trimmed roofline, the stairways up the south face and the walls at its foot.

Open the 3D model →Download it for Minecraft

What to look for in the 3D model

• Tiers up the hill. The palace is piled up the mountainside rather than set on top of it, so the buildings step back as they rise and seem to grow out of the rock.
• Leaning walls. The walls are battered: they lean inwards as they rise, and they are thickest at the bottom, said to be up to about five metres at the base.
• The Red Palace in the middle, highest of all, with the White Palace on both sides of it.
• Gold on the roofline. The gilded roofs on the Red Palace’s roof terrace cover the halls of the Dalai Lamas’ tombs.
• The zigzag stairways climbing the south face, which linked the palace to Shöl, the village at its foot where the offices and workshops stood.
• Windows that grow as they climb: small and sparse low down, larger and closer together near the top.

Like every model on my3dhouse, it is an interpretation of the building from photographs, not a measured survey, so it is best for the big shapes: how the palace sits on the hill and how its parts fit together.

Inside the palace

The palace has more than 1,000 rooms. Britannica counts some 200,000 statues and 10,000 altars, and UNESCO’s evaluation adds nearly 10,000 thangkas, the painted and embroidered scrolls of Tibetan Buddhism. One winding corridor in the Great West Hall alone carries 698 murals.

The Red Palace holds the stupa tombs of eight Dalai Lamas: the 5th and the 7th to the 13th. The Great Fifth’s is the largest; Chinese state media put it at nearly 15 metres tall and covered in some 3,700 kg of gold.

Since 1959

In March 1959 the 14th Dalai Lama left Lhasa and went to India, where he has lived ever since. No Dalai Lama has lived in the Potala since. It is now a museum administered by the People’s Republic of China, and it remains one of the most important places of pilgrimage for Tibetan Buddhists. It was on China’s first list of protected national monuments in 1961, and it has been restored with state funding since 1989.

UNESCO inscribed the palace as a World Heritage Site in 1994, adding the Jokhang Temple in 2000 and the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lamas’ summer palace, in 2001. It describes the Potala as an outstanding example of theocratic architecture, and its 1994 evaluation could find only one complex to compare with it in scale and artistic wealth: the Holy See, in the Vatican. More than two million people visited in 2024.

Visiting the Potala Palace

Lhasa is at about 3,650 metres and the palace climbs higher, all of it on foot, so give yourself time to acclimatise before you go up. Foreign visitors need a permit for the Tibet Autonomous Region, arranged through a specialist travel agent in China, and must travel on an organised tour; the UK government’s travel advice notes that permits are sometimes stopped without warning.

Tickets are booked in advance in your own name, the number of visitors a day is capped, the visit inside is limited to about an hour and photography indoors has been banned. All of this changes often, including which days the palace closes, so check with your tour operator before you plan around it.

The Potala Palace in Minecraft

The Potala is one of the most satisfying buildings to make in blocks, because it is so nearly made of them already: flat roofs, rectangular masses, rows of windows and almost no curves. Its three colours, white, deep red and gold, read from right across a map, and the hill is half the build.

You can download the Potala Palace for Minecraft free, built from this model: a Java Edition world, a Bedrock world for iPhone, iPad and Android, or a schematic for Litematica or WorldEdit. At Small, one block per metre, it comes out about 444 blocks across and 118 tall with its hill, inside Minecraft’s height limit. The larger sizes are too big to fit in a world, so Small is the size the page offers.

If you are building it by hand, some blocks that work:

• White walls: mostly white terracotta, mixed with calcite for the splashed, dripping texture and a little white concrete for crisp edges. Large areas of quartz look too polished.
• The Red Palace: red terracotta, deepened with red nether bricks. Red concrete or wool is far too bright.
• The dark band under the roofs: nether wart blocks or crimson hyphae, studded with gold blocks for the gilt ornaments.
• Gold roofs: gold blocks for ridges and finials, and waxed cut copper stairs for the sloping faces, since there is no gold stair. Wax the copper or it turns green.
• Windows: black terracotta surrounds, slightly wider at the bottom, with dark oak trapdoors inside.
• The leaning walls: step the face in by one block every few rows and soften the steps with stairs, or exaggerate the lean a little at small sizes, where it otherwise disappears.

For more landmarks to download, see famous buildings in Minecraft.

Explore the Potala Palace in 3D →More castles and palaces in 3D