Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel

Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel, known colloquially as The Bearded Lama, was a Tibetan Buddhist lama and the unifier of Bhutan as a nation-state. In addition to unifying the various warring fiefdoms for the first time in the 1630s, he also sought a distinct Bhutanese cultural identity separate from the Tibetan culture from which it was derived.