For most of its history Gangtok was a minor settlement. The first capitals of the Namgyal kings were at Yuksom, Rabdentse and later Tumlong in North Sikkim. Gangtok's name is usually explained as meaning a hilltop or high ridge, and in the 19th century it was mainly known for Enchey and a few scattered houses.
That changed after the British tightened their hold on Sikkim in the 1880s and 1890s. The Political Officer John Claude White, posted to the kingdom in 1889, built his residency on the Gangtok ridge, and in 1894 the Chogyal Thutob Namgyal moved the royal capital from Tumlong to Gangtok, where a new palace was built near the present Tsuklakhang.
The town grew slowly as a trading stop on the route from Kalimpong to Lhasa through Nathu La, with Tibetan, Marwari and Nepali traders settling around the bazaar. After the 1959 Tibetan uprising and the closure of the border trade in 1962, it became more of an administrative and later a tourist town.
In 1975, after a referendum, Sikkim became the 22nd state of India and Gangtok its capital. The old palace still stands above the town, and the Tsuklakhang, the royal chapel beside it, remains the setting for the great masked dances of Pang Lhabsol and Losoong.
Sources
- Gangtok (Wikipedia)
- Kingdom of Sikkim (Wikipedia)
- John Claude White, Sikhim and Bhutan: Twenty-One Years on the North-East Frontier, 1887–1908 (1909)
Legends are retold differently from village to village. Where a story is told locally rather than written down, we say so.
