The local story
Fort, monastery and mission on the Tibet road
Pedong's history starts above the town at Damsang. In the late 17th century the Lepcha chief Gaeboo Achyok ruled a principality from here and fought the Drukpas of Bhutan for these hills. The fort usually dated to 1690, Damsang Gadi, was his stronghold; Lepcha lore says spirits carried its smooth round stones up from the Reshi river. Achyok was eventually captured and executed, Bhutan took the hills, and the fort was later used against the British before falling into ruin after the war of 1864.
Under Bhutanese rule, in the early 1700s, the Sangchen Dorjee monastery was built at Pedong, in the Drukpa Kagyu tradition of Bhutan. After the Treaty of Sinchula in 1865 the area passed to British India, and Pedong became a stage on the Kalimpong–Lhasa trade road. Mule caravans laden with Tibetan wool came down from Jelep La through Rhenock and Pedong, until the 1962 war closed the pass.
The road also drew missionaries hoping to reach Tibet. In 1882 the French priest Auguste Desgodins, of the Paris Foreign Missions, set up Cross Hill above Pedong as a memorial to missionaries who had died or disappeared trying to enter Tibet. It remains a place of pilgrimage for local Catholics.
