India Guide
Ladakh
The palace
Price: Rs100
Opening time: Daily sunrise to sunset
The derelict palace of sixteenth-century ruler Sengge Namgyal lords it over the old town from the top of a craggy granite ridge. A scaled-down version of the Potala in Lhasa, it's a textbook example of medieval Tibetan architecture, with gigantic sloping buttressed walls and projecting wooden balconies that tower nine storeys above the surrounding houses. Since the Ladakhi royal family left in the 1940s, damage inflicted by nineteenth-century Kashmiri cannons has caused large chunks of it to collapse. Take a torch, and watch where you walk: in spite of restoration work, holes gape in the floors and dark staircases.