Ak-Saray Palace: Timur's Vanished White Palace
Ak-Saray in Shakhrisabz: what Clavijo saw in 1404, how tall the portal really was (38 m left, 65-70 m est.), tickets, and the 2025 UNESCO plan to rename it.
Thursday, 28 August 1404, around the hour of midday mass. A party of Castilian envoys, sent by King Henry III to the court of Timur, rides out of the hills and sees Kesh lying in a green, well-watered plain: orchards, melon fields, cotton, an earthen rampart with drawbridges over a deep ditch. Ruy González de Clavijo is keeping a journal. They're fed in a mosque, lodged in a palace, and the next morning, Friday, their hosts walk them over to a building site. The locals tell him it has been under construction for twenty years, and the builders are still at work.
That site was Ak-Saray, the White Palace, and Clavijo's few pages are the fullest eyewitness description of it while it was in use. What survives in Shakhrisabz is two broken piers of its entrance portal.
What Clavijo walked through
He describes it in the order he walked it. In the 1928 English translation by Guy Le Strange (the relevant passage is on pages 206–209 of the scanned edition on archive.org), the sequence runs:
- A long entrance passage behind a high portal, lined left and right with brick archways faced in blue tile. Each opens into a small doorless room where Timur's attendants wait.
- A second gateway, then a courtyard paved with white flagstones, arcaded on all four sides, with a large water tank in the middle. Clavijo guesses it at about three hundred paces across.
- A very high gateway covered in gold and blue tilework, with the figures of a lion and a sun above the entrance and repeated over the courtyard arches.
- A square reception hall with gold-and-blue tiled walls and a ceiling worked entirely in gold, then galleries, private apartments, and a new garden of fruit trees and lawns.
He writes that the work would impress "even the craftsmen of Paris", which from a Castilian courtier was high praise.
He also argues himself into a corner. Because the lion-and-sun emblem wasn't Timur's own three-circle device, Clavijo concludes that parts of the palace must have been built by the ruler of Samarkand before Timur. Modern sources treat the whole complex as Timur's. An eyewitness is still a tourist with a theory.
How tall was the Ak-Saray portal?
Short answer: about 38 metres survives, and nobody can measure the rest.
The 38-metre figure for the standing piers is consistent across sources. Above that, the numbers spread out. Uzbekistan's national heritage register (meros.uz) puts the central part of the main portal at roughly 70 metres and gives the arch a span of 22.5 metres, which it calls the widest in Central Asia; other accounts use 65 metres for the original towers and 22 metres for the span. Some write-ups attach the 65-metre figure to Clavijo's visit. His text gives no height at all. He says the gateways were high and spacious and leaves it there.
Our reading: say "38 metres standing, probably 65–70 metres when complete" and treat the upper figure as an estimate. Nothing above the break survives to measure, so every original height is a model, much as with Bibi-Khanym in Samarkand, Timur's other build-it-bigger project.
Twenty-four years, and one signature
Work began in 1380, and most sources put its end around 1404, which is where the "24 years" in every description comes from. Clavijo's hearsay "twenty years" is close enough. "Finished" is a slippery word, though: workmen were still on site that week, and Timur died the following February.
The tilework carries its own evidence. According to the heritage register, the facing preserves a date of 798 in the Islamic calendar (1395–96 CE) and the name of a craftsman, Muhammad Yusuf Tabrizi, from Tabriz in today's Iran. Timur routinely moved artisans from conquered cities to his own projects; this signature is that policy made visible. The wider story of Timur and his building programme covers where those craftsmen came from.
How did a palace this size disappear? Slowly. Tradition blames the Shaybanid ruler Abdullah Khan, in the 16th century, for ordering it pulled down, though that's tradition rather than documented fact. By the second half of the 18th century, the register says, only the piers and part of the main arch were left. The arch itself has been gone for somewhere around two to three centuries; the official tourism portal says it fell "almost 300 years ago".
What's there now
Two piers of brick and mosaic, with open sky where the arch used to meet. Up close, the tile is the reason to come: geometric panels in turquoise, deep blue and white, and bands of lettering big enough to read as pattern from the ground. It isn't restored to a showroom finish, and we think that makes it more honest than the heavily rebuilt Bibi-Khanym.
The palace grounds are now a landscaped park, and a bronze statue of Amir Timur stands in front of the ruin. It went up in 1996 for the 660th anniversary of his birth and is attributed to the sculptor Ilkhom Jabbarov. For the piers without the statue, walk round to the side.
Clavijo's three hundred paces works out at roughly 200–250 metres. The register reconstructs the courtyard as 120–125 metres wide and 240–250 long, so he was probably pacing its length.
Visiting Ak-Saray: tickets and timing
Can you see it for free? From the park, yes. Getting up to the base, where the tilework is, needs a ticket from the booth.
- Fee: reports range from 30,000 UZS (Journal of Nomads, which notes a lower price was possible in low season) up to 40,000 UZS in 2025 traveller reports, roughly $2.50–3.30; bring small som notes (last checked: September 2026). Our tracker of entry fees is updated as prices change.
- Hours: no official opening hours are published. Listing sites call the park open around the clock, but the ticketed area follows the booth's daytime staffing (last checked: September 2026).
- Time needed: 30–45 minutes at the ruin itself.
- Light: the piers are open ground with almost no shade. Morning is cooler and quieter.
Getting there, timings for the rest of the town, and how to combine it with Dorus Saodat and Kok Gumbaz are in our Shakhrisabz day-trip guide.
Ak-Saray's new place on the UNESCO list
In July 2025, at its 47th session, the World Heritage Committee approved in principle Uzbekistan's plan to shrink the Shakhrisabz World Heritage property to four Timurid monuments and rename it "Ak-Saray and Timurid Monuments of Shakhrisabz", with the rest of the old centre becoming a buffer zone. The background to that decision, and why the site has been on the Danger List since 2016, is in our piece on the UNESCO downgrade.
One detail from that session concerns the ruin directly. According to Gazeta.uz's report, UNESCO's recommendations told Uzbekistan to avoid irreversible conservation methods, specifically silicone injections into the walls of Ak-Saray, because they could affect the structure's resistance to earthquakes. Uzbekistan's conservation report was due by 1 February 2026, and the full revised dossier by 1 February 2029.
So the piers you're photographing are the subject of a live argument about keeping 38 metres of 600-year-old brick upright in a seismic zone. Before you go, read Clavijo's pages 206–209 on your phone. It takes ten minutes, and it turns a park with a ruin in it back into a building.