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HISTORY OF LADAKH
According to a local legend, Ladakh was once underwater centuries ago. A Buddhist monk, Dha Chomba Nomegung, came from Kashmir and prayed for the existence of human life there. His prayers were answered and the water receded, giving way to mountains and valleys. Then came three different races of Mon, Brokpa, and Tibetans in search of pasture and settled down in the different regions.
For close to 900 years from the middle of the 10th century, Ladakh was an independent kingdom , its dynasties descending from the king of old Tibet. 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 travered 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 two months to carry them from Amritsar to the Central Asian towns of Yarkand and Knotan. On this long route, Leh was the stopping point, and developed into a bustling entreport, its bazaars thronged with merchants and merchandise from far countries.
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The famous pashm (better known as cashmere) also came down from the high-altitude plateau of eastern Ladakh and western Tibet where it was produced, thorough 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, that finally spelt the doom of the independent kingdom. It attracted the greedy eyes of Raja Gulab Singh, the ruler of Jammu in the early 19th century, and in 1834, he sent General Zorawar Singh to invade Ladakh. A bitter war followed lasting more than a decade resulting in turmoil, which ended with the emergence of the British as the paramount power in north India. Ladakh, together with the neighboring province of Baltistan, 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.
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