North Sikkim History: Lepcha Dzongu, Dzumsa and the Lake

An oath at Kabi Lungchok

Drive 17 km north of Gangtok and you reach a grove of cypress with standing stones beside the road. This is Kabi Lungchok, and the story told here is the one Sikkim tells about its own beginning. In the 13th century, the account goes, Khye Bumsa, a prince from Kham in eastern Tibet, came south and met the Lepcha chief and seer Thekong Tek. The two swore blood brotherhood, binding Lepcha and Bhutia as one people, and the stones mark the place.

The descendants of Khye Bumsa became the Namgyal dynasty, and in 1642 Phuntsog Namgyal was consecrated the first Chogyal of Sikkim at Yuksom. For our purposes the important point is that the north of Sikkim was never an empty frontier. It was Lepcha country first, then a Lepcha and Bhutia country under the Chogyals, whose capital stood at Tumlong, near Phodong, from 1793 until 1894. When you pass through Phodong on the way north, the ruins of that capital are a short climb above the road.

Dzongu, the Lepcha reserve

Lepchas call themselves Mutanchi Rongkup, and their name for this land is Mayel Lyang. Lepcha elders tell that the creator mother Itbu-moo shaped the first man and woman, Fudongthing and Nazaong Nyu, from the snows of Kongchen Konglo, the mountain the rest of the world calls Kanchenjunga. That is why the mountain is their guardian, and why its peaks, lakes and rivers are part of Lepcha prayer. We tell this as Lepcha lore, as it is told in Dzongu homes.

Dzongu, the wedge of valleys across the Teesta from Mangan, was set aside for the Lepchas in the time of the Chogyals, and the protection continued after Sikkim joined India in 1975. Outsiders still need a permit to enter, and land is held by Dzongu Lepchas. That is the reason villages such as Lingthem, Passingdang and Hee Gyathang still speak Lepcha at home and keep their shamans, the bongthing and the mun, alongside Buddhist lamas.

Upper Dzongu holds Tholung Monastery, revealed as a sacred site in 1760 and built in 1789. During the Gorkha invasions, relics from other monasteries were hidden there, and every third year in April they are brought out for the Kamsel display. In 2007 and 2008 Dzongu came to national attention when Lepcha activists of the Affected Citizens of Teesta held a long hunger strike in Gangtok against hydropower projects planned in the reserve; several projects were later dropped.

The Dzumsa of Lachung and Lachen

Above Chungthang the valley forks. The Lachen Chu comes down from the north-west, the Lachung Chu from the north-east, and they meet to form the Teesta. Up each river lies a Bhutia village: Lachen, the big pass, and Lachung, the small pass. Their families traded wool, salt and grain over the high passes into Tibet until 1950, moving with their yaks between summer and winter settlements.

Each village runs itself through the Dzumsa, a council in which every household has a voice. It is led by an elected headman, the Pipon, and it settles disputes, decides grazing rules and the yearly movement of herds, and today sets rules for tourism, waste and land. The system took shape in the first half of the 19th century, and Sikkim's law still lets the Dzumsa stand in place of an elected panchayat in these two villages. As a visitor you feel it in small ways: rules on plastic, on where vehicles park, and on who may buy land, which is no one from outside.

Trade shaped both villages. Until the border closed after 1950, Lachen families took their yaks over the passes toward Tibet, and Lachung families did the same up their own valley, carrying grain and cloth north and bringing back wool and salt. When the trade ended, the villages turned to herding, apples, potatoes and, from the 1990s, to the visitors who now fill their homestays every spring and autumn. Lachung's apples and the potato fields above Lachen are the visible traces of that change. The Dzumsa, which once settled grazing quarrels and trade dues, now decides questions about vehicles, lodges and rubbish too.

Hooker in the high valleys

In 1849 the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker walked up both valleys on his Sikkim expedition, collecting rhododendron seed and crossing toward the Donkia pass and the Tibetan plateau. He described Lachung and Lachen in his Himalayan Journals, published in 1854, and many rhododendrons in Victorian gardens grew from seed he sent home. Late in that same year, Hooker and Archibald Campbell, the Superintendent of Darjeeling, were detained by officials of the Sikkim court. Their release was followed by a British annexation of Sikkimese land in the Darjeeling hills. The rhododendrons Hooker admired are the same ones that still flower in the Shingba sanctuary at Yumthang in late April and May.

Gurudongmar, told as lore

Gurudongmar Lake lies at about 5,180 m, a few kilometres south of the Tibetan border. The story most often told in Lachen is Buddhist: Guru Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche, who brought Buddhism to the Himalaya in the 8th century, passed this way, and when the herders who came here asked for water in winter, he blessed part of the lake so that it would not freeze. People still point to a patch near the shore that stays open when the rest is ice. This is lore, told with devotion, and we pass it on as that.

Some Sikh traditions tell a different story, linking the lake to Guru Nanak. The competing claims have at times been the subject of local dispute. On the shore today you see prayer flags and a small shrine, and visitors of every faith carry home bottles of the water. Whatever story you hold, the rule is the same: walk quietly, do not throw coins or litter, and remember you are a guest in a place that is sacred to the people who live below it.

The flood of October 2023

On the night of 3–4 October 2023, South Lhonak lake, a glacial lake in the far north-west of the district, burst through its moraine wall after heavy rain. The flood reached Chungthang around midnight, destroyed the Teesta III dam within minutes, and then tore out bridges, houses and long stretches of road down the Teesta valley, including parts of NH10 between Sikkim and Bengal. Many lives were lost, among them soldiers at a camp near Singtam.

Since then, North Sikkim has opened and closed in stages. The Chungthang crossing and the Lachen road have been the slowest to recover, and monsoon landslides have closed them again more than once. Lachung, Lachen and the Dzongu villages have rebuilt with the help of the people who visit. If you go, go knowing this history, and check current status before you travel.