Journey
Ladakh and Zanskar
A high desert on the upper Indus that was a Kashmiri Buddhist frontier before it was a Tibetan one, an independent kingdom until 1842, and a caravan crossroads until 1949. Three of its edges are closed borders now, which is why a place that was a junction for two thousand years reads as a dead end.
Stops (14)
- Mulbekh Maitreya · 8th century
A nine-metre Maitreya carved in relief on a free-standing rock beside the Srinagar to Leh road, in a Kashmiri rather than Tibetan style, with a Kharosthi inscription on the same rock putting writing on it earlier still. Mulbekh village sits on the line where Buddhist and Muslim Ladakh meet, with a mosque and a gompa in sight of each other.
- Alchi Monastery, Ladakh · 11th–13th century
Alchi on the Indus, whose murals are the oldest in Ladakh and are Kashmiri in idiom — which makes them the closest surviving evidence anywhere of what Kashmiri painting looked like, in a valley where none of it survives. The tradition is preserved outside its homeland because Ladakh was dry, remote and never sacked.
- Lamayuru · the oldest foundation
Lamayuru on a spur above the Indus gorge, the oldest monastic foundation in Ladakh, a Bon site before it was Buddhist and traced in tradition to Naropa and to a lake that was drained for it. The eroded badlands below are called the moonland, and the basin does hold lake sediments, so the story is geologically plausible.
- Basgo · the three-year siege
Basgo's mud-brick citadel above the Indus, with three Maitreya temples inside holding sixteenth and seventeenth-century painting. It withstood a three-year Mongol and Tibetan siege in the 1680s, and the relief was bought from the Mughal governor of Kashmir at the price of a mosque in Leh and a nominal conversion — which is how Ladakh settled with the plains.
- Hemis Monastery, Ladakh · 1672
Hemis, the richest Drukpa monastery in Ladakh, founded under the Namgyals after that settlement, holding a two-storey thangka unrolled once every twelve years. Its Tsechu masked dances are the best known in Ladakh, and the monastery's wealth is the visible dividend of the kingdom's seventeenth-century political arrangement. The thangka is unrolled in the courtyard for two days once every twelve years, and the last unveiling drew more visitors than the monastery could house.
- Thiksey Monastery, Ladakh · 1430
Thiksey, a twelve-storey Gelug complex stacked up a hill in the manner of the Potala, with a fifteen-metre seated Maitreya built into a purpose-made chamber for the Dalai Lama's visit in 1970. The Gelug arrived in Ladakh through Tibetan rather than Kashmiri channels, which is the later of the two layers here.
- Phuktal · the cave
Phuktal, built into the mouth of a cliff cave above the Tsarap in Zanskar, its cells stacked in a honeycomb under the overhang and reachable only on foot. Alexander Csoma de Kőrös spent a winter here in the 1820s compiling the first Tibetan-English dictionary, so Tibetan lexicography began in a Zanskari cave.
- Diskit Monastery, Nubra Valley · 1420
Diskit in the Nubra, the oldest and largest monastery of that valley, with a thirty-two-metre Maitreya above it facing the Shyok and, by local account, towards Pakistan. The Nubra was the Ladakhi side of the Karakoram trade, so its monasteries sat on a caravan road rather than on a pilgrimage one.
- Turtuk · changed country 1971
Turtuk, a Balti village of apricot terraces on the Shyok, the last inhabited place before the Line of Control and one of only four Balti villages on the Indian side. Its people speak Balti, a Tibetan language, and are Muslim. It was in Pakistan until the 1971 war, families were divided by the new line, and it was opened to outsiders only in 2010.
- Changthang and the Changpa · the pashm plateau
Changthang, above four thousand metres and continuous with Tibet's own plateau, grazed by Changpa herders moving Changthangi goats, yak and sheep between seasonal camps. The pashm those goats grow in winter is combed, not shorn, and carried to Srinagar to be spun — so a Kashmiri luxury industry rests on a Ladakhi pastoral one.
- Leh · the caravan bazaar
Leh's bazaar, where the Central Asian trade came off the Karakoram Pass: pashm and charas south, Indian cotton and tea north, with Kashmiri, Punjabi, Yarkandi and Tibetan houses trading in one street. The traffic ended in 1949 when the Xinjiang border closed, and Leh went from a junction to a terminus in a single year.
- Nubra & the Karakoram Pass · the high route
The Nubra valley and the Karakoram Pass at over five thousand five hundred metres, the highest regularly used trade route in the world until 1949, crossed by pony and camel caravans that left the bones of their animals along it. Beyond it lay Yarkand and Kashgar, which is what made Leh a crossroads rather than an outpost.
- Ladakh petroglyphs · Neolithic to early historic
Thousands of carvings along the upper Indus — ibex, hunters, chariots — with stupas cut later by the same technique on the same boulders, so the rock records the arrival of Buddhism directly. The petroglyph fields lie along the route over the passes, which is the other thing they record.
- Sindhu Darshan, Leh · the river tirtha
Sindhu Darshan at Leh, where the Indus is worshipped as a river rather than as a border — a festival instituted in 1997, which makes it the newest entry in this repository's sacred geography and a deliberate act of national imagination applied to a river that now mostly flows through another country.