Buddhist influences may have been at work in Ladak from an early period.  In later times it can be regarded as a dependency of Tibet, at any rate for ecclesiastical purposes, for it formed part of Tibet until the disruption of the kingdom in the tenth century and it subsequently accepted the sovereignty of Lhasa in religious and sometimes in political matters.  Concerning the history of Bhutan, I have been able to discover but little.  The earliest known inhabitants are called Tephu and the Tibetans are said to have conquered them about 1670.  Lamaism probably entered the country at this time, if not earlier.[970] At any rate it must have been predominant in 1774 when the Tashi Lama used his good offices to conclude peace between the Bhutiyas and the East India Company.  The established church however is not the Gelugpa but the Dugpa, which is a subdivision of the Kar-gyu-pa.  There are two rulers in Bhutan, the Dharmaraja or spiritual and the Debraja or temporal.  The former is regarded as an incarnation of the first class, though it is not clear of what deity.[971]

The conversion of Sikhim is ascribed to a saint named Latsun Ch’embo, who visited it about 1650 with two other Lamas.  They associated with themselves a native chief whom they ordained as a Lama and made king.  All four then governed Sikhim.  Though Latsun Ch’embo is represented as a friend of the fifth Grand Lama, the two sects at present found in Sikhim are the Nying-ma-pa, the old unreformed style of Lamaism, and the Karmapa, a branch of the Kar-gyu-pa, analogous to the Dugpa of Bhutan.  The principal monasteries are at Pemiongchi (Peme-yang-tse) and Tashiding.[972]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 910:  Tibetan orthography Sron-btsan-sgam-po.  It is hard to decide what is the best method of representing Tibetan words in Latin letters: 

(a) The orthography differs from the modern pronunciation more than in any other language, except perhaps English, but it apparently represents an older pronunciation and therefore has historical value.  Also, a word can be found in a Tibetan dictionary only if the native spelling is faithfully reproduced.  On the other hand readers interested in oriental matters know many words in a spelling which is a rough representation of the modern pronunciation.  It seems pedantic to write bKah-hgyur and hBras-spuns when the best known authorities speak of Kanjur and Debung.  On the whole, I have decided to represent the commoner words by the popular orthography as given by Rockhill, Waddell and others while giving the Tibetan spelling in a foot-note.  But when a word cannot be said to be well known even among Orientalists I have reproduced the Tibetan spelling.

(b) But it is not easy to reproduce this spelling clearly and consistently.  On the whole I have followed the system used by Sarat Chandra Das in his Dictionary.  It is open to some objections, as, for instance, that the sign h has more than one value, but the more accurate method used by Grunwedel in his Mythologie is extremely hard to read.  My transcription is as follows in the order of the Tibetan consonants.