The western kingdoms
The break-up of the Tibetan empire sent members of the royal house west, where they founded kingdoms in Guge and Purang in the upper Sutlej and Kailash country, in Maryul in Ladakh, and in Zanskar. Guge's capital at Tsaparang, a honeycomb of chambers cut into a clay ridge, and its monastery at Toling, were the centre of the region's religious life.
It was from Guge that the second diffusion of Buddhism was organised. The king Yeshe-Ö sent Rinchen Zangpo and others to Kashmir to train, and later invited the Bengali master Atiśa Dīpaṅkara from Vikramaśīla to Tibet — a journey that reshaped Tibetan Buddhism and produced the Kadam school from which the Gelug later descended.
Zanskar, a high valley south of Ladakh reached only over passes, retained its own petty kings under Ladakhi overlordship, and its monasteries at Karsha, Phugtal and Zangla remain in use.
The end of Guge
Guge was destroyed in the 1630s in a war involving Ladakh and complicated by the presence of a Jesuit mission — António de Andrade had reached Tsaparang in 1624, the first European known to have crossed the Himalaya, and the mission's favour with the king contributed to the conflict with the monastic establishment that preceded the collapse.
Tsaparang was abandoned and is now a ruin in the Chinese-administered Ngari prefecture; Zanskar is part of the Indian union territory of Ladakh.
Further reading
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
- Talbot, Cynthia. Precolonial India in Practice. Oxford University Press, 2001
- Singh, Upinder. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India. Pearson, 2008
- Ali, Daud. Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India. Cambridge University Press, 2004
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.