Five Lamas' War (1634)

The Five Lamas' War, also recorded in Bhutanese chronicles as the conflict with the Lam Kha Nga (ལམ་ཁག་ལྔ་, "the five lama factions") and in modern military histories as the Second Battle of Simtokha Dzong, was a confrontation fought in 1634 between the followers of Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal and an alliance of five rival Buddhist sects of western Bhutan backed by the Tsangpa dynasty of Tibet. The Bhutanese victory, though secured by a dzong explosion rather than a pitched field battle, is conventionally treated as the decisive moment in the establishment of Drukpa Kagyu political supremacy over the western valleys and is read in later chronicles as a foundation event of the unified Bhutanese state of Druk Yul.

Background

Ngawang Namgyal, the hierarch who would be known as the Zhabdrung, arrived in western Bhutan in 1616 after fleeing the Tsang region of Tibet. His flight followed a contested recognition dispute over the reincarnation of Pema Karpo, the fourth Drukchen, in which his claim was rejected by the Tsangpa ruler in favour of a rival candidate. He settled in the upper Thimphu valley and founded Cheri (Chagri Dorjeden) monastery in 1620, which became the first institutional seat of what would become the Drukpa Kagyu state.^[1]

Western Bhutan at the time was not a single polity. Authority over its valleys was divided among several Buddhist lineages that had held religious and territorial power since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These included the Lhapa Kagyu, a branch of the Drikung Kagyu that had constructed several of Bhutan's earliest dzongs; the Nenyingpa; the Chagzampa or Iron Bridge school associated with the lineage of Thangtong Gyalpo; the Barawa Kagyu; and smaller groups including the Kathogpa and the Gelug-leaning Gedan Shingtapa.^[2] The Drukpa Kagyu, though present in the region through earlier lineages, were only one competing school among several when the Zhabdrung arrived.

From the late 1610s onward the Zhabdrung began to unify spiritual and temporal authority in his own person. He attracted lay patronage, absorbed rival Drukpa branches, and in 1629 began construction of Simtokha Dzong on a bluff commanding the southern approaches to the Thimphu valley. The building of Simtokha, completed in 1631, was both a defensive work and a political statement: it announced a single Drukpa Kagyu hierarchy ruling from a fortified seat rather than a loose network of valley lamaseries.^[3]

Earlier clashes, 1617–1631

The war of 1634 was not the first confrontation between the Zhabdrung and his rivals. Bhutanese tradition records Tibetan invasions launched against him in 1617 and again in 1629, the latter timed to coincide with the construction of Simtokha. During the 1629 episode — sometimes called the First Battle of Simtokha — the five lama factions combined with Tsangpa backing and attacked the unfinished dzong. The coalition's leader, a figure recorded in the Drukpa chronicles as Palden Lama, was killed in the fighting, and the attack was repulsed.^[4] The same year is noted in Bhutanese sources for the arrival of the Portuguese Jesuits Estêvão Cacella and João Cabral at the Zhabdrung's court — two unrelated events in 1629 that together mark the Zhabdrung's emergence as a recognisable political ruler.

The defeat of 1629 did not end the opposition. Surviving Lam Kha Nga hierarchs retreated, regrouped, and in the early 1630s pressed the new Tsangpa ruler, Karma Tenkyong Wangpo, to intervene on their behalf. From their viewpoint the Zhabdrung was not a unifier but a sectarian upstart whose fortified monastery at Simtokha directly threatened valley institutions they had held for generations. Negotiations between the Tsangpa and the Zhabdrung's side are recorded in later accounts but broke down without resolution.^[4]

The Five Lamas

The phrase Lam Kha Nga, literally "five lama factions", is the traditional Bhutanese label for the anti-Zhabdrung coalition. Modern scholarship notes that sources diverge on exactly which five sects composed it. The Lhapa Kagyu and the Nenyingpa are named consistently in every surviving account as the coalition's core. Beyond those two, the literature variously lists the Barawa, the Chagzampa, the Kathogpa, the Sakyapa and the Gedan Shingtapa (a Gelug-aligned group). Some chronicles add a sixth school, and the phrase "five" may have become fixed as a formulaic number rather than a strict count.^[5]

Whichever exact combination is accepted, the shared grievance of the coalition was the same: each sect had held valley-level religious authority for generations, and the Zhabdrung's consolidation of political and spiritual offices under a single Drukpa command threatened to strip them of their institutional standing. The coalition was therefore as much a defensive front of established interests as a rival ideological movement.

The 1634 campaign

In 1634 Karma Tenkyong launched what later Bhutanese tradition treats as the second major Tsangpa invasion of the Zhabdrung's territory. The campaign was coordinated with the Lam Kha Nga, whose surviving hierarchs provided local intelligence, guides and auxiliary forces. The Tsangpa army, according to the chronicles preserved in the Lho'i chos 'byung and later histories, was divided into five divisions (some accounts give six columns) that advanced into Bhutan from multiple directions: through the Paro valley, across the Gasa–Laya passes, down into the Thimphu valley toward Simtokha, and through the eastern approaches into Bumthang.^[4]

The main western columns converged on Simtokha Dzong, which was then the Zhabdrung's principal seat. Bhutanese sources record that the fort's defenders were outnumbered and that Tsangpa troops breached the walls and entered the dzong. The Zhabdrung's own situation at the height of the battle is recorded in the chronicles as gravely threatened, with the new polity's survival in doubt.

The destruction of Simtokha

What turned the campaign was not a Bhutanese counter-attack in the field but an accident inside the captured dzong. While Tsangpa troops were looting Simtokha's stores, the dzong's gunpowder magazine was ignited — whether by accident, by a surviving defender, or by deliberate arson is not resolved in the sources. The resulting explosion destroyed the dzong, which had been completed only three years earlier, and killed a large part of the Tibetan force occupying it.^[4]

The Zhabdrung's followers regrouped in the confusion that followed and attacked the surviving Tsangpa contingents. The remaining Tibetan columns, some of which had not yet reached their objectives, withdrew northward. The Bumthang column, cut off from the main force, was unable to hold its position. By the end of the campaigning season the Tsangpa had been driven out of Bhutan and the Lam Kha Nga coalition was broken as a political force. Barawa lamas are recorded as having been expelled from the country in the aftermath, and the Nenyingpa saw their monastic estates seized.^[2]

Casualty figures are not recorded in any reliable source. Bhutanese chronicles present the outcome as a miraculous deliverance credited to the Zhabdrung's ritual powers; Tibetan accounts treat the same event as a military disaster caused by an accidental fire. Both framings are partisan, and modern historians generally treat the explosion as the contingent event on which the campaign turned rather than the product of superior Bhutanese strategy.

Consequences

Religious consolidation

The war of 1634 is the point at which the Drukpa Kagyu became the dominant sect of western Bhutan. The Lhapa Kagyu, which had built several of the earliest dzongs — including the first structure at Punakha — lost its political position and never recovered it. The Nenyingpa survived only as a reduced religious presence, with many of their lamas fleeing north into Tibet and their temples eventually maintained by local lay communities. The Barawa were expelled. The Chagzampa lineage continued as a minor bridge-builder tradition but ceased to function as a political actor. Estates and monastic properties of the defeated coalition were absorbed into the Drukpa Kagyu state.^[2]

Construction of the great dzongs

With western Bhutan secured, the Zhabdrung embarked on a programme of dzong-building that produced the architectural backbone of the Bhutanese state. Punakha Dzong was built in 1637–38 on the confluence of the Pho Chhu and Mo Chhu and became the winter capital. Wangdue Phodrang Dzong followed in 1638, Paro Rinpung Dzong in 1644–46, and Trongsa Dzong in 1647–48, along with others that extended the state's reach into central and eastern Bhutan. Simtokha itself was rebuilt after the explosion and survives today.

The dual-governance system

The post-war decades saw the formalisation of the chhoesi nyi or dual system of governance, under which the Zhabdrung held supreme spiritual authority while a civil deputy, the Druk Desi, exercised temporal administration. The first Druk Desi, Tenzin Drukgye, was appointed in 1651. The Zhabdrung also promulgated a legal code, the Tsa Yig, which established the first written framework of state law in Bhutan. These institutions, rather than the battle itself, are what gave the 1634 victory its enduring effect: they turned a military win into a durable state.

Continuing conflict with Tibet

The defeat of 1634 did not end Tibetan campaigns against Bhutan. Further invasions followed in 1644, 1648, 1657, 1668, 1675 and 1679, and the long series of Bhutan–Tibet wars continued into the early eighteenth century, culminating in the Battle of the Great Raven in 1714. Each of these campaigns was repelled, and the northern frontier eventually stabilised along its present line. The cumulative effect of these wars was to confirm the outcome of 1634 on a wider scale: Bhutan remained a distinct polity, separate from the successive Tibetan regimes that claimed authority over its Buddhist institutions.

Historiography and sources

The 1634 war is poorly documented by the standards of the period. The main Bhutanese source is the Lho'i chos 'byung, a seventeenth-century religious history compiled within the Drukpa Kagyu tradition itself and therefore openly partisan. It presents the Lam Kha Nga as obstructionists acting against the divinely sanctioned unification of the country and credits the destruction of Simtokha to the Zhabdrung's ritual powers. Later Bhutanese chronicles largely follow this framing.

Tibetan sources, where they discuss the campaign at all, treat it as a failed Tsangpa expedition and view the Zhabdrung as a sectarian secessionist rather than a legitimate unifier. Neither tradition provides independent corroboration of troop numbers, specific engagements or the identities of every member of the Lam Kha Nga coalition.

The most detailed modern account is in Karma Phuntsho's The History of Bhutan (2013), which reconstructs the campaign by triangulating Drukpa chronicles against Tibetan sources and later oral tradition. Earlier academic treatments include Michael Aris's Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (1979) and the papers of John Ardussi on the Zhabdrung period, which remain the foundational English-language studies of this era. All three authors caution that the surviving narrative is shaped by seventeenth-century religious polemic and that the precise sequence of events in 1634 cannot be fully reconstructed.^[6]

Legacy

In Bhutanese historical memory the Five Lamas' War sits alongside the Zhabdrung's arrival in 1616 and the building of the great dzongs as one of the founding episodes of the country. The emphasis placed on it varies: older Drukpa accounts treat the victory as miraculous and theologically inevitable, while modern Bhutanese historians present it more cautiously as a contingent outcome that happened to set the direction of the state for the next three centuries. Either way, the disappearance of the Lhapa, Nenyingpa, Barawa and Chagzampa as political actors after 1634 is undisputed, and the Drukpa Kagyu character of the Bhutanese state that emerged from the war has persisted to the present day.

See also

• Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal
• Drukpa Kagyu
• Punakha Dzong
• Wangdue Phodrang Dzong
• Trongsa Dzong
• Druk Desi
• Battle of the Great Raven
• History of Bhutan

References

1. Ngawang Namgyal — Wikipedia
2. Dorji Penjore, "Luminaries and Legacies of Nenyingpa in Western Bhutan" — A Bowl of Suja
3. Simtokha Dzong — Wikipedia
4. Second Battle of Simtokha Dzong — Wikipedia
5. Battle of Five Lamas — Military Wiki
6. Karma Phuntsho, The History of Bhutan (2013) — author page
7. "The advent of Zhabdrung Rinpoche" — Kuensel
8. Military history of Bhutan — Wikipedia
9. Karma Tenkyong — Wikipedia