Place · high-altitude trans-boundary lake · India
Pangong Tso
Also known as Pangong Tso, Pangong Lake, Banggong Co
A 134-kilometre endorheic saltwater lake at 4,350 metres on the Ladakh-Tibet frontier, with roughly sixty per cent of its length inside Chinese-administered Tibet and the rest in Indian Ladakh. The water changes colour through the day from turquoise to deep blue, and the shoreline — barren high-altitude cold desert, with Changpa pastoralists' summer camps in a few sheltered inlets — has become one of the most-visited parts of Ladakh since the 1990s. The 2020 Galwan standoff turned the lake into one of the Sino-Indian border's most-watched flashpoints.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Tradition
- Standard reference and local gazetteers; ASI, state archaeology and INTACH records where applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.749, 78.683
Connections (1)
- Site withinChangthang and the Changpa
Pangong Tso sits on the northern edge of the Changthang plateau, within the same high-altitude cold desert landscape the Changpa pastoralists have grazed Changthangi goats across for centuries. The lake's southern shore holds a few seasonal Changpa camps, and the Changthangi grazing cycle still includes the Pangong basin despite the 1962 border closure that split the Changthang between Indian Ladakh and Chinese-administered Tibet.