Darjeeling History: From Thunderbolt Hill to Tea

The place of the thunderbolt

The name is usually read as Tibetan: dorje, the thunderbolt sceptre that lamas hold in ritual, and ling, a place. Dorje-ling, the place of the thunderbolt. Tradition ties the name to a Buddhist shrine that once stood on Observatory Hill, the wooded knoll above Chowrasta where the Mahakal temple stands today. Climb the steps there and you will see something the town is quietly proud of: Hindu priests and Buddhist lamas sharing one shrine, with prayer flags and temple bells side by side.

The local account says the old monastery on the hill, the forerunner of today's Bhutia Busty gompa, was damaged during the Gorkha wars of the early 1800s and moved downhill. We tell that as the town tells it, not as settled history. What is certain is that long before any of this the Lepcha were here, the oldest people of these hills, farming, hunting and gathering in the forests long before tea or railways.

Gorkha wars and a ridge for convalescents

For most of the 18th century these hills belonged to the Chogyals of Sikkim. Expanding Gorkha armies from Nepal overran much of the area in the late 1700s, and after the Anglo-Nepalese war of 1814–16, the Treaty of Titalia in 1817 restored the tract to Sikkim with the East India Company as guarantor.

In 1828 Captain George Lloyd and J. W. Grant, on Company business in the region, came up to what Lloyd called the old Goorkha station of Dorjeling. They saw cool air, a long ridge and the snows of Kanchenjunga, and recommended it as a sanatorium where Company servants could recover from the heat and fevers of the plains.

On 1 February 1835 the Chogyal, Tsugphud Namgyal, signed a deed of grant handing the hill tract to the Company for that purpose. An annual allowance was paid to Sikkim later. It was a small, thinly peopled strip of forest. Within a few decades it was a busy hill town at the head of a tea district.

Campbell's seeds and the first gardens

Dr Archibald Campbell of the Indian Medical Service became superintendent of Darjeeling in 1839. Around 1841 he planted China tea seeds in his garden at Beechwood as an experiment. The bushes grew. Others followed his lead, and by 1852 the first commercial gardens were being laid out at Tukvar, Steinthal and Aloobari, all within an hour or two of the town.

Campbell was also at the centre of a crisis. In 1849 he and the botanist Joseph Hooker, who was collecting rhododendrons in Sikkim, were briefly held by the Sikkim court. The British answered in 1850 by annexing more Sikkimese land, and the district grew. The Kalimpong hills were added from Bhutan after the Treaty of Sinchula in 1865.

Tea needed labour, and workers came mostly from eastern Nepal, which is why Nepali became the common language of the hills. Today there are about 87 Darjeeling gardens, and in 2004 Darjeeling tea became India's first product with a Geographical Indication tag.

The town filled out around the trade. Lloyd Botanic Garden was laid out below the market in 1878 on land given by the Lloyd family, and in 1915 the forests of Senchal, above the lakes that still supply much of Darjeeling's drinking water, were declared one of India's earliest wildlife sanctuaries. Walk down to Happy Valley Tea Estate on the Lebong road and you can still see an older garden worked by hand.

The railway climbs in

Until the 1880s goods and people came up by bullock cart and pony along the Hill Cart Road. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway changed that. Built on a 610 mm gauge, it followed the road up from the plains in zigzags and loops and reached Darjeeling in 1881, 88 km from what is now NJP. Ghum station, at 2,258 m, became the highest point on the line.

The famous Batasia Loop, the spiral below Ghoom that eases the gradient into Darjeeling, came later, in 1919. In 1999 UNESCO listed the railway as a World Heritage Site. The small museum at Ghum station is the best place to see how it was done.

Where the hillside was too steep even for a loop, the engineers used reverses: the train runs forward up one arm of a Z, stops, and backs up the next. The best-known loop lower down is Agony Point near Tindharia. Ride a joyride today and you are on the same narrow track that carried planters, schoolchildren, soldiers and tea chests for well over a century.

Poets, patriots and a nun

The statue at Chowrasta is of Bhanubhakta Acharya (1814–1868), the poet who rendered the Ramayana into Nepali. His birth anniversary is still marked in the hills, and the statue is a reminder that Darjeeling's literary life is as much Nepali as it is English or Bengali.

Two great figures of Bengal died here. Sister Nivedita, the Irish-born disciple of Swami Vivekananda, died on 13 October 1911 at Roy Villa; her memorial stands at the cremation ground below the railway station. Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, the Congress leader, died at his house, Step Aside, on 16 June 1925. Down the valley at Mungpoo, Rabindranath Tagore spent four long stays between 1938 and 1940 at the cinchona plantation house that is now a museum.

After 1947: climbers and refugees

Tenzing Norgay had lived in Darjeeling for years before he and Edmund Hillary reached the summit of Everest in 1953. On 4 November 1954 the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute was founded here, with Tenzing as its first Director of Field Training. When he died in 1986 he was cremated at the institute, where his memorial and statue stand beside the Everest Museum. The Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park next door opened in 1958.

In 1959, after the Dalai Lama left Tibet, refugees crossed into India in thousands. In October that year the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Centre was set up at Hill Side on the Lebong road, and it still runs carpet-weaving workshops you can watch. The ropeway down to Singla opened in 1968. Politics changed too: the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council was formed in 1988, and the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, which runs many of the lodges we recommend, in 2012.

A timeline you can carry

Dates we are confident of, for quick reference on the walk.

Where to see the history today

All of this fits into two unhurried days on foot, with one shared jeep ride to Ghoom. We like to start early at Observatory Hill, when the lamas and priests are lighting lamps, and finish at Batasia in late afternoon light. Some sites keep short or irregular hours; check current status before you travel.

• Observatory Hill and the Mahakal shrine, five minutes above Chowrasta, for the Dorje-ling story.
• Bhanubhakta's statue at Chowrasta, then the Mall for the old British town.
• HMI, the Everest Museum and Tenzing's memorial on Jawahar Parbat, on the same ticket as the zoo.
• The Tibetan Refugee Self Help Centre and Happy Valley Tea Estate, both down the Lebong side.
• Ghum station museum, Yiga Choeling monastery (founded 1850) and Batasia Loop, by shared jeep or toy train.
• Sister Nivedita's memorial below the railway station, and Lloyd Botanic Garden below the market.