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Situated in the west of town, on the route of the #2 minibus, the Norbulingka (Jewel Park), the Summer Palace of the Dalai Lamas (daily 9.30am-12.30pm & 2.30pm-5.30pm; Y25), is not in the top league of Lhasa sights, but worth a look if you've time on your hands. However, if you're in Lhasa during the festivals of the Worship of the Buddha (July) or during Shotun, the Yoghurt Festival (Aug/Sept), when crowds flock here for picnics and to see masked dances and traditional opera, you should definitely make the trip out here. The forty-hectare park has been used as a recreation area by the Dalai Lamas since the time of the Seventh incarnation. The first palace to be built was the Palace of the Eighth Dalai Lama , the closest to the entrance, constructed towards the end of the eighteenth century and this became the official summer residence to which all Dalai Lamas moved, with due ceremony, on the eighteenth day of the third lunar month. Other buildings open to the public are the Palace of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in the far northwest corner beyond the appalling zoo and, the highlight of the visit, the New Summer Palace , built in 1956 by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. It was from here that he fled Lhasa in 1959. Visitors pass through the audience chamber, via an anteroom to the meditation chamber, on to his bedroom and then into the reception hall dominated by a fabulously carved golden throne, before passing through to the quarters of the Dalai Lama's mother. The Western plumbing and radio sit beside fabulous thangkas and religious murals. It's all very sad and amazingly evocative, the forlorn rooms bringing home the reality of exile.
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