Ladakh & Zanskar · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
People
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rinchen Zangpo | 958–1055 | Translator and temple founder | The great translator of the second diffusion of Buddhism in the western Himalaya. He studied in Kashmir, brought Kashmiri artists and craftsmen back over the passes, and is traditionally credited with founding a large number of temples across Ladakh, Zanskar, Spiti and the wider region. The Kashmiri-style painting at Alchi and its sister temples belongs to the world he opened. |
| Sengge Namgyal | r. c. 1616–1642 | King | The builder king of the Namgyal dynasty — the nine-storey Leh Palace, the expansion of Hemis, and much of the monastic and civil fabric the region still uses. His reign is the one Ladakhi material culture is most visibly dated to. |
| Alexander Csoma de Kőrös | 1784–1842 | Philologist | A Hungarian who reached Zanskar in search of the origins of his own people, spent years at Zangla and Phuktal working with a Ladakhi lama, and produced the first Tibetan grammar and dictionary in English, published in 1834. Tibetan studies as a discipline begins in an unheated room in Zanskar. |
| Ghulam Rasool Galwan | 1878–1925 | Caravan guide and author | A Leh man who began as a pony boy on Central Asian expeditions and rose to be a caravan headman, and who wrote Servant of Sahibs in his own idiosyncratic English — published in 1923, and one of very few accounts of the Central Asian trade written by a Ladakhi rather than about one. |
| Abdul Wahid Radhu | 1922–2011 | Trader and memoirist | From a Leh Muslim family that ran the caravan trade between Ladakh, Kashmir and Lhasa; he travelled the route himself and wrote a memoir of a commerce and a world that ended in his lifetime. It is a rare first-hand record of Ladakh's Muslim mercantile society. |
| Kushok Bakula Rinpoche | 1917–2003 | Monk and public figure | The nineteenth Bakula Rinpoche, head of Ladakh's Gelug establishment, later India's ambassador to Mongolia, and the figure most associated with the twentieth-century reorganisation of Ladakhi monastic education. Leh's airport carries his name. |
| Morup Namgyal | Twentieth–twenty-first century | Singer and folklorist | Sang and recorded a very large part of the Ladakhi folk repertoire through radio in Leh, and in doing so fixed in recorded form a body of song that had been transmitted only by memory. |
| Sonam Wangchuk | b. 1966 | Engineer and education reformer | Founded an alternative school and campus that teaches through Ladakhi conditions and materials, and developed the ice stupa — a conical tower of stream water frozen through winter and left to melt in spring, which addresses the region's real agricultural constraint, which is not annual water but water in April. |
| Nawang Tsering Shakspo | Twentieth–twenty-first century | Historian and folklorist | Collected and published Ladakhi folk song, oral history and cultural history in English and Ladakhi at a point when almost none of it had been written down, and helped establish the study of Ladakhi culture from inside the region. |
People from Ladakh & Zanskar who shaped its history, arts, science, sport and public life. (9)