Told in the hills
How a monastery hill became a British sanatorium
The name is commonly traced to Dorje Ling, the place of the thunderbolt in Tibetan, after a Buddhist monastery that once stood on Observatory Hill. Before any of that, these forests were Lepcha country, home to the people who call themselves Rong and who knew every plant on the ridge. The tract passed between Sikkim and Nepal in the wars of the late eighteenth century, and came back to Sikkim after the British defeated Nepal and drew new borders in 1816–17.
In 1829 two British officers, Captain George Lloyd and J.W. Grant, stopped on the ridge while settling a border dispute and saw a cool, healthy place for a sanatorium. On 1 February 1835 the Chogyal of Sikkim signed a Deed of Grant giving the hill to the East India Company. From 1841 the Company paid him an annual allowance. Archibald Campbell, the first superintendent, planted tea seeds in his garden at Beechwood that same year.
Tea changed everything. Gardens opened from 1852, labour came from Nepal, and the town grew. In 1881 the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway arrived. Today's Darjeeling, with its Nepali-speaking majority, Lepcha and Bhutia families, Tibetans who came after 1959, Bengali visitors and old British churches and schools, is the result of that history, still argued over in the Gorkhaland debate.
Pinned to the board
Did you know
Archibald Campbell planted Darjeeling's first tea seeds in his garden at Beechwood in 1841, using China-type seed raised in Kumaon.
Darjeeling tea was the first product in India to get a Geographical Indication tag, registered in 2004–05.
Tenzing Norgay, who reached the summit of Everest with Edmund Hillary on 29 May 1953, made his home in Darjeeling and was cremated in 1986 at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, where his memorial stands.
