Place · trade town · India
Leh
Also known as Leh — the caravan bazaar
The Ladakhi capital and the last town on the Indian side of the Karakoram, where the Yarkand and Kashgar caravans halted, paid duty and reloaded — Central Asian traders wintering in the town, and Kashmiri, Punjabi and Balti agents handling the transfer.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.160, 77.580
Worth knowing
Pashmina from western Tibet came through here to Kashmir and made the shawl industry; Ladakh's control of that traffic is why the Dogras took it in 1834. The route closed completely in 1949 when Xinjiang shut, and the bazaar has served pilgrims and tourists ever since.
Connections (6)
- Trade routeSrinagar
Pashmina wool from the western Tibetan plateau came through Leh and over the Zoji La to Srinagar, where it was spun and woven into the shawls that made Kashmir's name in Europe. Control of that one commodity chain is why the Dogras took Ladakh in 1834 and why the trade treaties of the nineteenth century concentrate on it. When the Xinjiang and Tibet routes closed in 1949 and 1959 the Leh bazaar lost the whole of its business within a decade.
- Trade routeHemis Monastery, Ladakh
Leh's bazaar and the Ladakhi monasteries were two parts of one economy: the monasteries held land, lent money, and took a share of the caravan trade, and Hemis — the largest and richest of them — was endowed by the Namgyal kings out of exactly that revenue. When the Xinjiang and Tibet routes closed in 1949 and 1959 the bazaar's business ended within a decade and the monasteries lost their trading income with it.
- Trade routeChangthang and the Changpa
Leh's bazaar and the Changthang pastures are the two halves of the pashm trade: Changpa herders combed the wool at four thousand metres, Leh's brokers bought and graded it, and it went over the Zoji La to Srinagar to be spun and woven. The Karakoram traffic ended in 1949 and the Chinese border closed the winter pastures in 1962, and both ends of the trade contracted together.
- AnalogueQissa Khwāni Bazaar, Peshawar
Leh's bazaar and Qissa Khwāni are the two surviving caravan bazaars at the subcontinent's northern rim, and they served the two routes into Central Asia. Leh handled the Yarkand and Tibet traffic — pashm, brick tea, borax — across the Karakoram passes. Peshawar handled the Kabul and Bukhara traffic through the Khyber. Both were places where goods, credit and news changed hands, and in both the storytelling and the trade were the same business, since a bazaar without news is only a market.
- Route adjacencyThe Wakhan Corridor
Leh and the Wakhan are two ends of the same high traffic. Caravans out of Yarkand and Khotan came over the Karakoram passes to Leh, where pashm, brick tea, borax and charas changed hands for Indian cloth and dyes; the Wakhan carried the western branch of the same Central Asian trade toward Badakhshan and Chitral. Both were closed by twentieth-century borders — Leh's route by the Chinese frontier after 1950, the Wakhan by the 1895 buffer and everything since — and both bazaars now trade with nobody over the passes.
- Site withinSindhu Darshan, Leh
The Sindhu Darshan ghat sits within Leh, the Ladakhi capital at 3,500m on the Indus, 7 kilometres east of the city centre. The BJP-instituted 1997 Sindhu Darshan festival each 1-3 June brings pilgrims to this ghat on the Indus for aarti and immersion, formalising a Hindu pilgrimage to the Vedic Sindhu river that passes through the broader Ladakhi strategic landscape.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Leh”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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