the region in the 13th century, and missionaries of the Gelug school came in the 17th century. The Gelug school is the sect to which most Monpas belong today. The Monpa were never regarded as Tibetan, even though they adopted the Tibetan language and script. They were regarded as an "inferior race" to whom the civilising influence of Buddhism had to be brought from Tibet. Around the 14th century, Monyul came under increasing Tibetan political and cultural influence, which was apparent in the years when Tsangyang Gyatso, an ethnic Monpa, became the 6th Dalai Lama. However, Monyul, also known as the Tawang Tract, remained a remote area and sparsely populated until the middle of the 20th century. Monyul remained an autonomous entity, with local monks based in Tawang holding great political power within the kingdom, and direct rule over the area from Lhasa was established only in the 17th century. From this time until the early 20th century, Monyul was ruled by authorities in Lhasa. One of the first British-Indian travellers into Monyul, Nain Singh Rawat, who visited the area from 1875 to 1876, noted that the Monpa were a conservative people who shunned contact with the outside world and made efforts to monopolise trade with Tibet. In 1914, as part of the negotiations for the Simla Convention, Britain and Tibet negotiated their mutual border roughly along the crest of the Himalayas, which came to be called the McMahon Line. The line divided the land in which the Monpas inhabited, and became a source of contention in subsequent years because of ambiguities in the specific location of the McMahon Line. Languages The languages spoken by the Monpa people are often referred to as the "Monpa languages". This is not a genealogical term, and several quite different languages are subsumed under it. "Monpa languages" include Kho-Bwa, East Bodish, and Tshangla languages. According to Blench (2014), five groups may be distinguished: The Sherdukpen, Lish, and Sartang languages show no obvious relationship to other languages of the region and they comprise a small language isolate cluster. These three languages are related to Bugun, and form a "Kho-Bwa" group together with it. The Tawang language is an East Bodish language, and is a variety of Dakpa. The languages of the Zemithang, Mago and Thingbu villages are additional East Bodish varieties that are not mutually intelligible with Tawang. The Tshangla language within Bodish comprises closely