Foundation
The Tawang valley, on the southern slopes of the Himalaya, is the home of the Monpa people, who practise Tibetan Buddhism. In the seventeenth century the Gelug government of the Fifth Dalai Lama extended its influence over the region, partly in competition with the Drukpa school of neighbouring Bhutan. The Fifth Dalai Lama's emissary, the Monpa lama Merak Lodre Gyatso, founded the monastery on a ridge above the valley in 1680–81. Its full name, Galden Namgyal Lhatse, means "the celestial paradise of the divine site of complete victory".
The monastery is built like a fortress, with a walled enclosure of some sixty buildings for several hundred monks, a three-storeyed assembly hall, and a library of old scriptures. Its main image is a gilded Buddha several metres high. The annual Torgya festival is celebrated with masked dances in its courtyard.
The Sixth Dalai Lama
Tsangyang Gyatso, the Sixth Dalai Lama, was born in 1683 at Urgelling, near Tawang, into a Monpa family. He was identified in secret during the years when the regent Sangye Gyatso was concealing the death of the Fifth Dalai Lama, and enthroned in Lhasa in 1697. He became famous for rejecting monastic vows and for his love songs, which are still widely sung, and he died in 1706 in the custody of the Mongols who had deposed him. His birthplace is a place of pilgrimage.
The border
For two centuries Tawang was administered from Tibet, through officials who collected dues from the Monpas, while the monastery itself was a major landholder. At the Simla conference of 1914, British and Tibetan representatives agreed a boundary, the McMahon Line, that placed Tawang south of the border, in British India. China did not accept the agreement. Tibetan officials continued to operate in Tawang into the 1940s, and India took over the administration in 1951.
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama entered India by way of Tawang in March 1959 after his escape from Lhasa. In the war of 1962 Chinese forces crossed the Namka Chu in the opening days of their offensive in October and occupied Tawang within the week. They withdrew north of the line after declaring a ceasefire in November, and Indian administration returned. The Dalai Lama's later visits to Tawang, in 2009 and 2017, drew formal protests from Beijing. China continues to claim the area as part of Tibet, and the monastery's status and the Dalai Lama's visits there remain sensitive in relations between India and China.
Further reading
- Snellgrove, David. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Serindia, 1987
- Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi. Macmillan, 2007
- Lopez, Donald S. The Story of Buddhism. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001
See also
- Arunachal chiefships — The Arunachal hills held dozens of distinct peoples governed by village councils and clan chiefs, with Tibetan Buddhist monastic authority in the west around Tawang.
- Tibet — Tibet is a high-plateau region of Inner Asia, home to the seventh-to-ninth-century Tibetan Empire and to Tibetan Buddhist civilization, ruled after 1642 by the Dalai Lamas' Ganden Phodrang government and administered since the 1950s by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region.
- Vajrayana — Vajrayana is the tantric development of Mahayana Buddhism, using mantra, visualisation, ritual and initiation to pursue buddhahood by an accelerated path, dominant in Tibet and Himalayan Buddhism.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.