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 lost territory to its neighbours, gave Darjeeling to the British, hosted the first British Political Officer on the Tibetan frontier, and married its last crown prince to a young woman from New York. Very little of that history is signposted on the ground, yet it explains almost everything about how Sikkim looks and feels today. It is also the thread that ties together the middle stretch of Odyssey Traveller’s small group tour of Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan, where Gangtok and Rumtek sit between a British-built hill station and an independent Himalayan kingdom that survived.

A Himalayan Kingdom in a Contested Region

Long before there was a kingdom, the forested valleys below Kangchenjunga belonged to the Lepcha, the earliest people known to have lived in what is now Sikkim. Their name for the land, Mayel Lyang, is still used, and many of the mountains, rivers and lakes carry Lepcha associations older than any monastery. From the fourteenth century onward, Bhutia clans of Tibetan origin began settling in the region. Sikkimese tradition records a pact of brotherhood between the Bhutia chief Khye Bumsa and the Lepcha leader Thekong Tek at Kabi Lungchok in North Sikkim, an agreement still remembered as the social foundation of the later state.

The kingdom proper begins in 1642. According to the founding story, three Tibetan lamas travelling into Sikkim from different directions met at Yuksom in the west, and there consecrated Phuntsog Namgyal, a descendant of Khye Bumsa, as the first Chogyal, or dharma king. The title matters. The Chogyal was a religious as well as a political ruler, and the Namgyal dynasty tied Sikkim firmly to the Tibetan Buddhist world, in doctrine, in art and in its sense of itself. Sikkimese Buddhists had long regarded the land as a beyul, one of the sacred hidden valleys said to have been blessed by Guru Rinpoche, and the new kingdom was built on that idea.

Royal authority did not stay in one place. Yuksom served as the first capital until 1670, when the second Chogyal, Tensung Namgyal, moved the court to Rabdentse, a ridge-top palace near present-day Pelling. In 1793 the capital moved again, north and east to Tumlong, and a century later, in 1894, to Gangtok. Each move tells part of the story: the kingdom’s centre of gravity drifted steadily away from its western heartland as that heartland became harder to defend.

Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal and the Sikkim Borderland

Sikkim’s position was both its reason for existing and its greatest weakness. It controlled some of the easiest routes between the Tibetan plateau and the plains of Bengal, which made it valuable to every power around it. From its foundation the kingdom looked to Lhasa as a religious and political patron, and when trouble came, it came from the other two directions.

Bhutan invaded first. In 1700, a Bhutanese force entered Sikkim with the support of the Chogyal’s half-sister, who had been passed over for the throne. The young Chakdor Namgyal fled to Lhasa and was restored only with Tibetan help, and over the course of the eighteenth century Sikkim lost the hills east of the Teesta, around present-day Kalimpong, to its eastern neighbour. Then, from the 1770s, the expanding Gorkha state of Nepal pushed repeatedly into the west of the kingdom. Rabdentse was attacked, the western lowlands were overrun, and in 1793 the court abandoned Rabdentse for Tumlong, further from the Nepalese frontier.

The Gorkha wars also began a demographic change that no treaty would reverse. Large numbers of Nepali-speaking settlers moved east into Sikkim in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and later British policy encouraged more to come and farm the hills. By the twentieth century they formed a majority of the population, a fact that would shape the kingdom’s final years.

Can You See Sikkim’s Old Royal Capitals on This Tour?

Not the early ones. Yuksom and Rabdentse lie in West Sikkim, a long mountain drive from Gangtok, and they are not on this itinerary. The tour’s time in Sikkim is spent in and around Gangtok, the kingdom’s final capital from 1894 until 1975, which is where the later royal story, the British Residency and the monasteries patronised by the last Chogyals are all found.

Darjeeling and the Nineteenth-Century Shift

The British East India Company entered this story as Sikkim’s ally against a common enemy. When the Company went to war with Nepal in 1814, Sikkim sided with the British, and the peace that followed restored much of its lost western territory. Under the Treaty of Titalia in 1817, the Company returned the land to the Chogyal and guaranteed his sovereignty, in return for a role as arbiter of Sikkim’s disputes with its neighbours. It was a protective arrangement, and like most protective arrangements of the period, it did not stay that way.

In 1835 the Chogyal Tsugphud Namgyal granted the Company the ridge of Darjeeling as a sanatorium, a small enclave that grew within a generation into a hill station, a tea district and a railway terminus. That process, and what it meant for the people who lived on the ridge, is told in our article on Darjeeling’s heritage as a hill station between Sikkim and the British Raj. For the kingdom, the grant marked the moment its relationship with the British turned from alliance to dependence.

Relations soured quickly. In 1849 the superintendent of Darjeeling, Archibald Campbell, and the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker were briefly detained inside Sikkim during a survey expedition. The British response was to annex Sikkim’s southern lowlands. A further expedition in 1861 ended with the Treaty of Tumlong, which made Sikkim a British protectorate in all but name, opened it to British trade and travel, and allowed a road to be built through the kingdom towards Tibet. For the rest of the century, the question was no longer whether Britain would control Sikkim, but whether Tibet would accept it.

Tibet did not. In 1888 a Tibetan force occupied Lingtu, inside Sikkim’s northern frontier, and a British expedition drove it out. The following year the British installed John Claude White at Gangtok as the first Political Officer for Sikkim, with responsibility for relations with Tibet and Bhutan as well. White reorganised the kingdom’s administration and built the Residency that still stands in the town. In 1890 the Convention of Calcutta, signed between Britain and Qing China without any Sikkimese or Tibetan representative at the table, fixed the Sikkim–Tibet boundary along the watershed and recognised the British protectorate. In 1894 the Chogyal Thutob Namgyal moved his court from Tumlong to Gangtok, next door to the Political Officer. The capital that travellers visit today is, in that sense, a product of the Great Game as much as of the dynasty.

From Protectorate to Indian State

When Britain left India in 1947, Sikkim was not one of the princely states that joined the new Indian Union. Its status was settled instead by the Indo-Sikkim Treaty of 1950, which made the kingdom a protectorate of India: Sikkim kept its monarchy and managed its internal affairs, while India took responsibility for defence, external relations and communications. For the next quarter-century, the Chogyal presided over a small Himalayan state that issued its own stamps and passports but sat, strategically, on one of the most sensitive frontiers in Asia after China’s takeover of Tibet.

The last Chogyal, Palden Thondup Namgyal, succeeded his father in December 1963 and was crowned in 1965. Earlier that same year, 1963, he had married Hope Cooke, a twenty-two-year-old American, and the wedding drew international press attention to a kingdom most of the world had never heard of. The couple used that attention to press Sikkim’s case for a more distinct international identity, at the same time as political pressure was building at home.

That pressure came largely from Sikkim’s Nepali-speaking majority, many of whom felt under-represented in a system that had long favoured the Bhutia and Lepcha communities associated with the throne. Protests in 1973 led to elections in 1974 and a new assembly led by Kazi Lhendup Dorjee, which moved steadily towards closer union with India. In April 1975, Indian troops disarmed the palace guard in Gangtok, the assembly voted to abolish the monarchy, and a referendum on 14 April returned an overwhelming official majority in favour. On 16 May 1975, Sikkim became India’s twenty-second state.

How to describe those events is still debated. Supporters of the merger saw the end of an unrepresentative monarchy and the arrival of democratic government; the Chogyal and his supporters called it annexation, and some historians have questioned the circumstances in which the referendum was held. Palden Thondup Namgyal died in New York in 1982. Travellers will hear more than one version of this story in Sikkim, and it is worth listening to each of them.

Why the Sikkim Kingdom Still Shapes a Journey Through Sikkim

Almost everything a visitor sees in Gangtok makes more sense once this history is in place. The town’s position on a ridge facing Kangchenjunga reflects a late, strategic choice of capital rather than an ancient royal seat. Its mix of languages, from Nepali in the markets to Sikkimese Bhutia and Lepcha in the monasteries and villages, reflects two centuries of migration and a kingdom that was always more plural than its Tibetan Buddhist court. Our guide to Gangtok as a Himalayan capital between pilgrimage and modernity explores the town itself, from Enchey Monastery to the evening crowds on MG Marg.

Buddhist Sikkim, too, carries the kingdom’s mark. The Namgyal dynasty were patrons of monasteries across the country, and that tradition of royal patronage extended into the twentieth century. When the 16th Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, left Tibet in 1959, it was in Sikkim that he rebuilt an older monastery as his seat in exile. The story of that monastery is told in our article on Rumtek Monastery and the Karmapa tradition, and it is the first stop in Sikkim on this tour, reached on the drive in from Darjeeling.

Do You Need a Permit to Visit Sikkim?

Yes. Foreign visitors need a Sikkim permit in addition to an Indian visa, a requirement that reflects the state’s position on a sensitive international frontier, the same frontier that shaped the kingdom’s history. Your Tour Specialist can confirm exactly what is needed before departure.

How Much Time Does the Tour Spend in Sikkim?

Two nights, both in Gangtok. On day four the group drives from Darjeeling via the Peshok tea gardens and the Teesta valley, visiting Rumtek Monastery before arriving in Gangtok in the late afternoon. Day five is spent exploring the town, including Enchey Monastery, the Hanuman Tok viewpoint, the flower and orchid exhibition centre and the markets, before the group leaves for Gorumara National Park in the Dooars on day six.

How Physically Demanding Is Sightseeing in Gangtok?

Moderately so. The tour is rated Level 2, which means being able to manage three to five hours of activity a day, including walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground and climbing and descending stairs. Gangtok is built down the side of a steep ridge, so walking in the town involves slopes and steps, though the main sites are reached by vehicle and the central MG Marg is flat and closed to traffic.

Where the Kingdom’s Story Leads Next

Sikkim’s history does not stop at its borders, and neither does the route. From Gangtok the road drops through tea gardens and forest into the Dooars, lands that Bhutan once held and Britain took in 1865, before crossing into Bhutan itself at Phuentsholing, a journey described in our article on crossing from Sikkim to Bhutan by road. Bhutan is the neighbour that kept its independence where Sikkim did not, and travelling from one to the other in a single fortnight is one of the clearest ways to understand what the last Chogyal lost. For the full sequence of the journey, from Darjeeling to Paro, see our Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan itinerary, or explore the Tour of Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Bhutan, which travels this route in a small group of 6 to 14, with a Program Leader and local guides throughout.