The story of Darjeeling
From Dorje-ling to the tea hills
The name is usually traced to Tibetan: dorje, the thunderbolt sceptre of Buddhist ritual, and ling, a place. Local tradition holds that a small Buddhist shrine called Dorje-ling once stood on Observatory Hill, where Hindu and Buddhist priests today share the Mahakal temple. Before the British, this ridge belonged to the kingdom of Sikkim, was overrun by the Gorkhas of Nepal in the late 1700s, and was returned to Sikkim after the Anglo-Nepalese war. Its first people were the Lepcha, who call themselves Rong, or Rongkup, and whose names still mark many villages and rivers here.
In 1828 two East India Company officers, Captain George Lloyd and J. W. Grant, rode up to what they called the old Gorkha station of Dorjeling and saw a sanatorium in the cool air. On 1 February 1835 the Chogyal of Sikkim, Tsugphud Namgyal, signed a deed granting the hill to the Company. In 1839 Dr Archibald Campbell arrived as superintendent; around 1841 he planted China tea seeds in his garden at Beechwood. By 1852 the first commercial gardens, Tukvar, Steinthal and Aloobari, were in production.
The railway reached the ridge in 1881 on track just 610 mm wide, and Ghoom, at 2,258 m, became its highest station. Nepali-speaking workers came in their thousands for the gardens and the roads, Bengali officials for the summer seat of government, and after 1959 Tibetan refugees, who founded the Self Help Centre on the Lebong road. Tenzing Norgay made Darjeeling his home, and the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute opened here in 1954. The hills around keep that mix: Lepcha, Nepali, Tibetan and Bengali, in one tea-scented district.
