evidence: The remote Himalayan region of Ladakh, a union territory of India, has recently been in the news due to fighting between Indian and Chinese forces along disputed border with China’s Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). [...] Yet, regardless of where the existing boundary comes to lie, it would have kept Ladakh and Tibet apart: It would have merely formalized the fact that while Tibet lay in the Chinese sphere-of-influence, Ladakh would be associated with the political world of the Indian subcontinent. Despite their common history, religious heritage, and culture, how and why did Tibet and Ladakh come to be politically distinct? In fact, some of the western areas of the Tibetan plateau — Baltistan, part of the Pakistani region of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Indian union territory of Ladakh, as well as the Indian districts of Kinnaur and Lahaul and Spiti in Himachal Pradesh and the Nelong Valley of Uttarakhand— — were never truly ruled by the central Tibetan government, or a Chinese suzerin of Tibet. [...] Maryul, which evolved into today’s Ladakh, was the strongest of the three western kingdoms. It brought Zanskar — today located in Ladakh Union Territory, and famously the home of Kargil, site of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1999 — under its control, eventually annexing it in the 17th century, giving it a border with Kashmir. However, even before this, there was a powerful Kashmiri influence on Ladakh — for example, Hindu tantric deities began to be worshiped throughout the Tibetan plateau by way of Ladakh — and there were several Kashmiri invasions of Ladakh in the 13th and 14th centuries.