Ladakh
- the Wonder Land
The district of Ladakh lies at the border with Tibet at the most eastern
corner of the State of Kashmir. Placed at very high altitude this is a
region with very low population. It's surrounded by the great mountain chain
of Karakoram and Himalaya. It's also called "little Tibet" or "the
last Shangri-la". This land shelters a millennial culture where the
monasteries and the medieval temples (gompas) which keep invaluable
artistical treasures. The true repositories of an ancient knowledge, this
land is one of the few places where tradition has been manteined alive until
present days.
Leh, the capital, has the highest airport in the world. It's almost the
only way to access the area since november until may, because mountain
passes are closed.
The Ancient Times of Ladakh
From the middle of the 10th century, Ladakh was an independent kingdom, its
dynasties descending from the kings of old Tibet... For close on 900 years,
from the middle of the 10th century, Its political fortunes ebbed and flowed
over the centuries, and the kingdom was at its greatest in the early 17th
century under the famous king Sengge Namgyal, whose rule extended across
Spiti and western Tibet up to the Mayumla beyond the sacred sites of Mount
Kailash and Lake Mansarovar. And gradually, perhaps partly due to the fact
that it was politically stable, in contrast to the lawless tribes further
west; Ladakh became recognized as the best trade route between the Punjab
and Central Asia.
For centuries it was traversed by caravans carrying
textiles and spices, raw silk and carpets, dyestuffs and narcotics. Heedless
of the land's rugged terrain and apparent remoteness, merchants entrusted
their goods to relays of pony transporters who took about wo months to carry
them from Amritsar to the Central Asian towns of Yarkand and Khotan. On this
long route, Leh was the half-way house, and developed into a bustling
entrepot, itsbazaars thronged with merchants from far countries. The famous
pashm (better known as cashmere) also came down from the high-altitude
plateaux of eastern Ladakh and western Tibet where it was produced, through
Leh to Srinagar, where skilled artisans transformed it from a matted oily
mass of goat's underfleece into shawls known the world over for their
softness and warmth. Ironically, it was this lucrative trade, the finally
spelt the doom of the independent kingdom. It attracted the covetous gaze of
Gulab Singh, the ruler of Jammu in the early 19th century, and in 1834, he
sent his general Zorawar Singh to invade Ladakh. There followed a decade of
war and turmoil, which ended with the emergence of the British as the
paramount power in north India. Ladakh, together with the neighbouring
province ofBaltistan, was incorporated into the newly created State of Jammu
& Kashmir. Just over a century later, this union was disturbed by the
partition of India, Baltistan becoming part of Pakistan, while Ladakh
remained in India as part of the State of Jammu & Kashmir.
Ancient
Routes of Ladakh
For all its seeming inaccessibility, Ladakh's position at the centre of a
network of trade routes traditionally kept it in constant touch with the
outside world. From Chinese Central Asia, the mighty Karakoram range was
breached at the Karakoram range was breached at the Karakoram pass, a giddy
18,350 feet (5,600m). The trail from Yarkand crosssed five other passes of
which the most feared was the glacier-encumbered Saser-la, north of Nubra.
Travellers from Tibet could take one of two main routes. From the central
part of the country, the Tsang-po valley, they could pass the holy site of
Kailash-Mansarovar and reach Gartok, on a tributary of the upper Indus, from
where they followed the river down to Leh. Trade with the pashm- producing
areas of western Tibet flowed by amore northerly route, taking in the
village of Rudok a few miles into Tibet, and from there across to Chushul on
the Pangong-tso, up the length of the lake to Tangse, then across the 18,300
feet (5,578m) Chang-la to the Indus, and so to Leh. Baltistan, joined
administratively with Ladakh for 100 years, was linked to it either via the
Indus up to its confluence with the Suru-Shingo river, and on up to Kargil;
or by the Chorbat-la pass over the Ladakh range, the trail dropping down to
the Indus 40km below Khalatse, and following the river up to Leh.
The two main approaches to Ladakh from south of the Himalaya are roughly
the same as today's motor roads from Srinagar and Manali. The merchants and
pilgrims who made up the majority of travellers in the pre modern era,
travelled on foot or horseback, taking about 16 days to reach Srinagar'
though a man in a hurry, riding non-stop and with changes of horse arranged
ahead of time all along the route, could do it in as little as three days.
The mails carried in relays by runners stationed every four miles or so,
took four or five days. That was before the wheel as a means of transport
was introduced into Ladakh, which happened only when the Srinagar-Leh
motor-road was constructed as recently as the early 1960s.
