The local story
Rabong, a pass town and a mountain oath
Older maps and many locals still say Rabong or Rabongla. The la at the end is the Bhutia and Tibetan word for a pass, and the town grew on exactly that: a saddle on the shoulder of Maenam Hill, where roads from Namchi, from Gangtok via Singtam and from the Rangeet side at Legship meet. Bhutia, Lepcha and Nepali families farm the slopes around it, and for most of the twentieth century it was a quiet bazaar of tin roofs, tea shops and the Rabong Gompa, with Kanchenjunga filling the north-west horizon on clear winter days.
Ravangla is also where Sikkim's most Sikkimese festival is celebrated with the most energy. Pang Lhabsol, on the fifteenth day of the seventh Tibetan month in August or September, honours Mount Kanchenjunga as the guardian deity of the land. It also remembers the oath of blood brotherhood sworn at Kabi Longtsok by the Lepcha chief Thekong Tek and the Bhutia chief Khye Bumsa, with the mountain as witness. Sikkimese tradition credits the third Chogyal, Chakdor Namgyal, with shaping its warrior dances, which monks still perform in costume.
The town's skyline changed in the 2000s. To mark the 2,550th Buddha Jayanti, the anniversary of the Buddha, the Sikkim government began Tathagata Tsal, now called Buddha Park, beside the Rabong Gompa. Its centrepiece is a Buddha about 130 ft, or 40 m, tall. The 14th Dalai Lama consecrated it in March 2013, and Ravangla went from a jeep stop to a destination. A few kilometres away, Ralang keeps an older layer of the story: an eighteenth-century gompa and a much larger Kagyu monastery built in the 1990s.
