Zhol occupied the southern face of Marpo Ri, the Red Hill on which the Potala stands. Rectangular in plan, the village was enclosed by walls on three sides, with the hill itself forming the fourth. Each of the three walls had an entrance building -- main, eastern, and western -- controlling access to what was effectively Tibet's administrative capital. The distinction between "inner Zhol" within the walls and "outer Zhol," a sliver of houses along the south wall's exterior, reflected the hierarchy of a government town. Inside lived lay and religious dignitaries alongside the bureaucratic apparatus: revenue officers, magistrates in overcoats and caps with court records fastened to pillars, stable hands, dairy workers. Photographs from the 1930s show a low, dense settlement dwarfed by the Potala rising behind it.

Two stone pillars define Zhol's significance beyond its administrative role. The outer pillar, the doring chima, stands outside the village's southern entrance on the far side of Beijing Road. Erected around 764 during the reign of Trisong Detsen, it bears inscriptions that are the oldest surviving examples of written Tibetan. The text records Tibetan military campaigns against China, culminating in the brief capture of the Tang capital Chang'an -- modern Xi'an -- in 763. It is a victory monument, carved in a script that was itself only a century old when the stone was cut. The inner pillar, the doring nangma, sits beneath the stairs leading up to the Potala on the village's northern border. It carries no inscription at all -- a silence that has puzzled scholars for centuries.

In the summer of 1995, the families who had lived in Zhol for generations were evicted and resettled to northern Lhasa. Buildings not deemed part of the monument were demolished; the outer Zhol was razed entirely. In 2002, the Potala Palace Management Office took over the area under a Conservation and Improvement Project, renaming it Zhol City and planning its conversion into an exhibition complex for Tibetan folk arts. By 2007, twelve of the original twenty-two buildings had been renovated and opened to visitors, including the Spe Zhi and Lungshar residences, the five courts, the treasure hall, the printing shops, the tavern, the prison, and a new art school. The mint now displays a reproduction of coin-making machinery and traces the evolution of Tibetan currency until 1959, when the traditional monetary system ended.

Zhol today covers 50,000 square meters of the Potala Palace complex, a sanitized heritage zone where tourists photograph renovated buildings that once held prisoners and printed banknotes. The transformation from living village to museum raises questions familiar to preservation everywhere: whose history is being preserved, and for whom? The families who knew Zhol as home are gone. The magistrates' courts where disputes were settled, the stables where horses stamped in the cold morning air, the dairies -- all have been converted to exhibit space. What remains most powerfully is the doring chima, that pillar of stone bearing words carved more than 1,200 years ago. It stands on the far side of a modern road, recording a moment when Tibet projected power across Central Asia, written in a script that was still finding its form.