The kingdom
The Namgyals unified Ladakh and at their height ruled from the Karakoram to Guge in western Tibet, controlling the trans-Himalayan trade. Sengge Namgyal, the lion king, built the nine-storey palace at Leh — a model, in its stepped mass, for the later Potala at Lhasa — and endowed the monasteries at Hemis, Hanle and Chemrey.
The kingdom's Buddhism was Drukpa Kagyu, and its relations with Tibet were correspondingly complicated by sectarian as well as political questions.
The Tibet–Ladakh–Mughal war
In the 1680s Ladakh was invaded by a Tibetan and Mongol force. The king appealed to the Mughal governor of Kashmir, who sent troops on condition of the king's conversion to Islam and the payment of tribute; the war ended with the Treaty of Tingmosgang in 1684, which fixed the Ladakh–Tibet boundary and set the terms of the wool trade — Ladakh's monopoly of pashmina exports to Kashmir dates from it, and so does the Kashmir shawl industry's dependence on Ladakhi supply.
That treaty line is one of the antecedents of the modern boundary dispute in the region.
Conquest
Zorawar Singh, a general of Gulab Singh of Jammu, invaded Ladakh in 1834 and completed its conquest by 1842, going on to invade western Tibet, where he was killed at Taklakot. Ladakh became part of the Dogra state of Jammu and Kashmir, which was itself sold to Gulab Singh by the British in 1846.
The Namgyal family retained the palace at Stok, where its descendants live.
Further reading
- Ray, Himanshu Prabha. The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia. Oxford University Press, 1994
- Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.