Zhangzhung

Zhangzhung was an ancient kingdom in western and northern Tibet, centred on the region around the sacred Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar. Known mostly from later Tibetan writings, it is linked in tradition with the Bon religion, and it was absorbed by the expanding Tibetan Empire in the seventh century.

Western Tibet, today's Ngari region, is a high, dry land of mountains, plateaus and lakes, crossed by the upper courses of great rivers, the Indus, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra, which rise near Mount Kailash, a mountain sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Bon followers. Tibetan sources describe Zhangzhung as a powerful kingdom with its own kings, language and culture, older than the Yarlung dynasty of central Tibet. Some sources divide it into inner, middle and outer regions, reaching as far as Ladakh and the north-west.

According to Bon tradition, the capital of Zhangzhung was Khyunglung Ngulkhar, the "Silver Palace of the Garuda Valley", in the Sutlej valley west of Mount Kailash. Cave dwellings and ruins at Khyunglung have been linked to it. Another important site was Kyunglung.

Since the 1990s, archaeologists, such as John Vincent Bellezza, have surveyed western Tibet and the Changtang plateau, recording fortified hilltop settlements, temples, cemeteries, standing stones and rock art from the first millennium BCE and early first millennium CE. Excavations at sites such as Gurugyam and Chuvthag have found burials with Chinese silk, including a piece woven with Chinese characters meaning "kings and lords", bronze vessels, iron tools, beads and gold masks, showing contacts with China, Central Asia and South Asia. Some archaeologists associate these finds with Zhangzhung, though the connection is not certain.

In Bon tradition, Zhangzhung was the homeland of the religion and of its founder, Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, who is said to have come from Olmo Lungring, a land to the west. Bon, as later systematised, shares many features with Buddhism. Bon texts preserve words and phrases said to come from the Zhangzhung language, apparently a Tibeto-Burman language distinct from Tibetan, related to the West Himalayan languages of Kinnaur. Some early documents from Dunhuang may contain Zhangzhung words. How much Bon tradition reflects the ancient kingdom's actual religion is debated.

According to Tibetan chronicles, the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo married his sister, Sad-mar-kar, to Ligmigya, the king of Zhangzhung. She was unhappy, and according to later accounts, she sent a coded message, or helped her brother, and in the 640s Songtsen Gampo defeated and killed Ligmigya, bringing Zhangzhung under Tibetan rule. The Old Tibetan Annals record a revolt in Zhangzhung in the 670s, which was suppressed. The region became part of the Tibetan Empire, and its culture and religion influenced Tibetan civilisation.

After the fall of the Tibetan Empire in the ninth century, descendants of the royal family founded the kingdom of Guge in western Tibet, in the former Zhangzhung lands. Guge, with its capital at Tsaparang, played a central role in the revival of Buddhism in Tibet in the eleventh century, inviting the Indian teacher Atisha. Its ruins and temples, with fine murals, survive.

Our maps show Zhangzhung from 400 to 100 BCE. Its largest outline, about 660,000 square kilometres on the 400 BCE map, covers the western Tibetan plateau, with half in today's China and much of the rest in India, Nepal and Pakistan, a broad estimate for a kingdom whose borders are not well known.