Lhasa - the Holy City or Place of the Gods - is the vortex of Tibetan mysticism, a city that bewilders and intoxicates, regardless of the present-day Chinese existence. The enormous hilltop Potala, the empty 13-storey stronghold that was once the winter palace and seat of the Dalai Lama, is the most identifiable of the city's attractions.

Its white-and-red walls and yellow roofs rise above the sacred city, apparent to develop out of the hill on which it has stood since the seventeenth century. It is now a museum, an empty shell of its former self, its essential figure and his administration having taken its life with them when they escaped to India in 1959 following the Chinese occupation. And yet, as twentieth-century Chinese-born writer Han Suyin wrote, No one can remain unmoved by the sheer power and attractiveness of the building, with its thousand windows like a thousand eyes.

The Dalai Lamas, each of whom is thought to be the rebirth of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddhist embodiment of kindness, ruled Tibet as religious and worldly overlords from 1644; the current Dalai Lama, the 14th reincarnation, was just 16 when Tibet was occupied by China. His private apartments have been left intact, and astonishingly the building, said to have as many as 1,000 rooms, has been left untouched by the Chinese; in reality, they are renovating it.