The Potala Palace of seven decades ago was both sacred and profane. When the Fourteenth Dalai Lama arrived in Lhasa in 1939 to take up residence as a four-year-old, the winter seat of religious and administrative life was saturated with centuries of monks burning butter lamps and overrun with mice feasting on altar offerings.

It was also riddled with intrigue and could be a dangerous place even for a revered child. In his memoir, , Gyalo Thondup, an elder brother of the man who became today's Dalai Lama, tells how several of his sibling's predecessors never reached adulthood or died in mysterious circumstances.

But the lofty palace was also the backdrop for the young monk's strict life of study, "play, meditation, memorisation, meals and tea", helping turn the previously unremarkable toddler from Amdo into "the man of greatness that he was to become".

The palace was at the centre of what Tibet once was, a homeland where myth could define reality and the remedy for tragedy was ritual and prayer. In his account of home and exile, Gyalo writes the deaths of his newborn siblings were blamed on a cat ghost and "so many children died in infancy that we had no special ceremonies to mark their passing". It was a place where a fatal infection of the family's mules was a harbinger and nature provided more wild strawberries and raspberries than any child could possibly eat.