The palace was designed by an unlikely collaboration. The Dutch architect van Den Hentz brought European engineering and the use of concrete, then still considered a novel technology in Bali. A Chinese architect named Loto Ang contributed his own design traditions. And Balinese undagi, the traditional master builders who worked from sacred geometric principles, ensured the complex honored Hindu spatial order. The construction, completed in 1921, produced a palace that confounded easy categorization. Three large pools dominated the grounds, reflecting sky and volcano alike, their still surfaces broken only by the Gili Bale at the center. The main pavilion's white-washed walls and European proportions sat within a landscape of Balinese stone carvings and tropical gardens. Concrete, the material of colonial modernity, supported structures adorned with traditional Balinese ornamentation. The king of Karangasem was making a statement about the world he inhabited: hybrid, strategic, unwilling to be defined by any single tradition.

In 1937, the palace received a formal inauguration marked by the installation of a marble stele. The inscription was carved in two alphabets, Latin and Balinese script, and written in two languages, Malay and Balinese. The choice was political as much as ceremonial. Malay was the language of interethnic commerce and colonial administration. Balinese was the language of the court. Latin script carried the authority of the colonizer. Balinese script carried the authority of a literary and religious tradition stretching back centuries. By placing all four on a single stone, the king ensured his palace spoke to every audience that might claim authority over it. The guest list reinforced the message. The king of Siam visited. The governor general of the Netherlands came. The sultans of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, the great Javanese courts, were received here. Taman Ujung was not a provincial retreat. It was a diplomatic stage where a Balinese king received the powers of Asia and Europe on his own terms.

Mount Agung, visible from the palace on clear days, destroyed nearly everything in 1963. The eruption that killed more than a thousand people across eastern Bali buried Taman Ujung under volcanic debris. What the volcano spared, an earthquake finished in 1975. For over two decades, the palace lay in ruin, its pools cracked and empty, its pavilions roofless, its gardens overtaken by vegetation. The ruins became a kind of accidental monument to impermanence, the very idea that Balinese Hindu philosophy teaches but that no king building a twelve-hectare pleasure palace really expects to experience. Between 1998 and 2001, the Karangasem government undertook a restoration that rebuilt the pools, repaired the Gili Bale, and replanted the gardens. The work did not attempt to freeze the palace at any single moment in its history. Instead, the restored complex carries the visible marks of what it has survived: fresh concrete alongside original stone, new plantings framing old foundations.

Between the palace and the sea stands the Pura Lingga Yoni, a temple whose origin story is as improbable as the palace's architecture. During the construction of a breakwall in 2012, workers discovered a two-meter phallic-shaped stone ten meters offshore. The stone was brought to land, and a new temple was consecrated around it. The lingga and yoni, the paired Hindu symbols of Shiva and Shakti, of creation and cosmic balance, gave the temple its name. Its placement between the palace and the ocean adds a layer of meaning to the entire site. Taman Ujung sits at the edge of the land, and the temple sits at the edge of the water, marking the boundary between the human and the infinite. The king who built the palace chose this coastline for reasons the architecture alone does not explain. Land, water, mountain, sea: the Garden at the Edge occupies the intersection of all of them, which is precisely where Balinese cosmology places the sacred.