Category: Asia and the Orient

Drukgyel Dzong: Bhutan’s Fortress of Victory and the Tibetan Frontier

Drukgyel Dzong: Bhutan’s Fortress of Victory and the Tibetan Frontier At the head of the Paro Valley, where the road runs out and the old trail begins its climb toward Tibet, Drukgyel Dzong stands on a low spur above the river. It was built in the seventeenth century to mark a victory over invading Tibetan […]

Paro Rinpung Dzong: Fortress Monastery and Art in Bhutan’s Paro Valley

Paro Rinpung Dzong: Fortress Monastery and Art in Bhutan’s Paro Valley Anyone who flies into Paro, or out of it, sees Paro Rinpung Dzong from the aircraft window. The runway follows the valley floor, and the fortress stands on the slope above the river, a whitewashed mass so large it reads more like a walled […]

Punakha Dzong: Bhutan’s Palace of Great Happiness at Two Rivers

Punakha Dzong: Bhutan’s Palace of Great Happiness at Two Rivers Punakha Dzong stands on a narrow spit of land where two glacial rivers meet, its whitewashed walls rising straight from the water and its golden roofs catching the light of a valley far warmer than the mountain passes above it. For more than three centuries […]

Dochula Pass: Himalayan Views, Chortens and the Road to Punakha

Dochula Pass: Himalayan Views, Chortens and the Road to Punakha On a clear morning the road east out of Thimphu climbs through blue pine and hemlock until the forest opens onto a saddle of grass, a small temple, and 108 whitewashed chortens banded in red, with the whole eastern Himalaya laid out beyond them. This […]

Gorumara National Park: Wildlife and Forests in India’s Dooars

Gorumara National Park: Wildlife and Forests in India’s Dooars Gorumara National Park covers only about 80 square kilometres, yet a late afternoon at one of its watchtowers can bring Indian rhinoceros, gaur and elephant to the same stretch of riverbank. It lies in the Dooars of northern West Bengal, where the last ridges of the […]

Dooars, India: Tea Forests and the Himalayan Foothills

Dooars, India: Tea Forests and the Himalayan Foothills Somewhere below Gangtok, the road stops climbing for good. The terraced hillsides of Sikkim give way to sal forest, then to tea bushes clipped flat as a lawn beneath rows of shade trees, and the mountains that filled every window for days become a blue wall along […]

Rumtek Monastery: Sikkim’s Dharma Chakra Centre and the Karmapa Tradition

Rumtek Monastery: Sikkim’s Dharma Chakra Centre and the Karmapa Tradition Rumtek Monastery sits on a forested ridge across the valley from Gangtok, its gilded roof ornaments catching the light long before the town below has properly woken. It looks ancient, and in one sense it is: a monastery of the Karma Kagyu school has stood […]

The Kingdom of Sikkim: A Himalayan History Between Tibet, India and Bhutan

The Kingdom of Sikkim: A Himalayan History Between Tibet, India and Bhutan For three hundred and thirty-three years, a line of Buddhist priest-kings ruled a small mountain state wedged between Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan. The Sikkim kingdom was founded in 1642 and lasted until 1975, when it became India’s twenty-second state, and in between it […]

From Sikkim to Bhutan: Crossing the Eastern Himalaya by Road

From Sikkim to Bhutan: Crossing the Eastern Himalaya by Road For much of the year, the road out of Sikkim runs through cloud. Pine ridges give way without warning to the flat, steaming plains of the Dooars, and within a single day’s drive the traveller passes from misty Himalayan forest into warm lowland grassland, then […]

Darjeeling Heritage: A Hill Station Between Sikkim and the British Raj

Darjeeling Heritage: A Hill Station Between Sikkim and the British Raj Long before Darjeeling appeared on any colonial map, the ridge that carries the town today belonged to the Kingdom of Sikkim. Its name comes from the Tibetan words dorje (thunderbolt) and ling (place), a reference to a Buddhist monastery that once stood on what […]

Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan Itinerary: A 14-Day Journey Across the Eastern Himalaya

Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan Itinerary: A 14-Day Journey Across the Eastern Himalaya Three destinations rarely sit on the same itinerary, and fewer still make sense together the way Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan do. A tea-growing hill station built by the British, a Himalayan kingdom absorbed into India within living memory, and an independent Buddhist nation […]

Darjeeling Himalayan Railway: Mountain Engineering and the Toy Train

Darjeeling Himalayan Railway: Mountain Engineering and the Toy Train At Darjeeling station, a squat black steam engine no larger than a family car pulls out onto rails set barely two feet apart, and for the next two hours it climbs, loops and reverses its way up to Ghoom, the highest railway station in India. This […]

Gangtok, Sikkim: A Himalayan Capital Between Pilgrimage and Modernity

Gangtok, Sikkim: A Himalayan Capital Between Pilgrimage and Modernity Gangtok sits on a forested ridge at roughly 1,650 metres, wrapped in cloud for much of the year and looking out, on the clear mornings, toward Kanchenjunga. It was a scattering of hamlets and a single monastery until the 1840s, then the seat of an independent […]

Bhutanese Food: Red Rice, Ema Datshi and the Culture of the Table

Bhutanese Food: Red Rice, Ema Datshi and the Culture of the Table Long before the first chorten comes into view, Bhutan announces itself through its kitchens. Strings of scarlet chillies dry on farmhouse windowsills, red rice ripens in narrow terraced paddies, and every household keeps a block of pungent, soft cheese on hand for the […]

Darjeeling Tea: Terroir, Gardens and the Story of a Himalayan Cup

Darjeeling Tea: Terroir, Gardens and the Story of a Himalayan Cup At just over two thousand metres in the Himalayan foothills, the hillsides around Darjeeling carry a particular kind of quiet: rows of glossy tea bushes running into cloud, cut by narrow paths where pluckers move without hurry through the mist. The tea grown here […]

Daitokuji Temple: Zen, Hospitality and the Cultural World of Tea

Daitokuji Temple: Zen, Hospitality and the Cultural World of Tea Daitokuji’s roofs and gardens spread across 56 acres on Kyoto’s northern edge, most of them still closed to the public. On the twelfth day of Odyssey’s Walking Japan tour, after a morning among the raked gravel and pine of Ginkakuji, the group crosses Kyoto by […]

Ginkakuji: The Silver Pavilion and the Aesthetics of Higashiyama Culture

Ginkakuji, seen from across the garden pond in autumn. Ginkakuji has never worn the metal its name promises. Built in the 1480s as a retirement villa for the eighth Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimasa, and converted into a Zen temple after his death, the Silver Pavilion instead became the stage for a quieter revolution in Japanese taste […]

Ryoanji Temple: Zen Gardens, Stone and the Art of Interpretation

At the western edge of Kyoto’s temple district, a walled rectangle of raked white gravel and fifteen weathered stones has become one of the most reproduced images in the study of Japanese design. Ryoanji Temple’s dry-landscape garden gives away almost nothing about what it means, which is precisely what has kept scholars, monks and travellers […]

Kinkakuji: The Golden Pavilion and Kitayama Culture in Kyoto

On the second of two full days in Kyoto, the Walking Japan tour leaves the shogun’s audience halls at Nijo Castle for a very different kind of monument: a small three-storey pavilion, its top two floors sheathed in gold leaf, set beside a pond so still it holds a second, upside-down temple within it. Kinkaku-ji […]

Mogami River: River Travel and Basho’s Journey through Mountain Japan

Mogami River: River Travel and Basho’s Journey through Mountain Japan The Mogami River, whose swift current inspired one of Bashō’s most quoted haiku and once carried Edo-period rice to the coast. No stretch of Matsuo Bashō’s northern journey unsettled him quite like the Mogami River. By the time he reached its banks in the summer […]

Sado Gold Mine: Edo Currency, Labour and the Economy of a Shogunal State

Sado Gold Mine sits on an island most visitors to Japan never reach, yet for more than two centuries it helped pay for the government that ran the country. Its tunnels, cut by hand into the hills above the port town of Aikawa, produced the gold that the Tokugawa shogunate turned into currency, and the […]