Person · Drukpa Kagyu state founder

Ngawang Namgyal (the Zhabdrung)

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Not assessed

Worth knowing

His death about 1651 was concealed for more than fifty years: the state continued to issue his orders and admit no one to his chamber, which is among the longest political fictions successfully maintained anywhere.

Connections (2)

• Imperial administration ofPunakha Dzong

  Punakha is what Ngawang Namgyal built his state out of. Arriving in 1616 as a refugee from a Tibetan succession dispute, he raised the dzongs at Simtokha, Punakha, Wangdue and Paro, beat off repeated Tibetan and Mongol invasions, wrote the Tsa Yig code, and set up the dual government of Zhabdrung and Desi that ran Bhutan until 1907. Punakha was the seat of it until 1955, and the 1907 coronation and the 1910 treaty with British India both happened inside it.

• Power passed toTrongsa Dzong

  The office outgrew the founder's system. Ngawang Namgyal's dual government put religion and administration in separate hands, but the real power settled where the geography put it — with the Trongsa Penlop, who held the ridge the only east–west road ran through. After decades of civil war between provincial governors, Ugyen Wangchuck, Penlop of Trongsa, was made the first hereditary king in 1907, ending the Zhabdrung arrangement. Bhutan's crown prince still carries the Trongsa title before accession.

On these journeys

• Bhutan — the dzongs and the Drukpa

Sources

Wikipedia, “Ngawang Namgyal”. Michael Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (1979); John Ardussi on the Zhabdrung succession.

• Wikipedia — Ngawang Namgyal