इतिहास
This ridge has no ancient dynasty and its written history is short. Before the seventeenth century the country was Lepcha and Limbu, organised under chief-priests and clan councils rather than under a king, and what is known of that period comes from oral tradition and from the accounts later Buddhist chroniclers wrote down. The medieval period here therefore begins very late - in 1642, when three lamas consecrated Phuntsog Namgyal at Yuksom as Chogyal, priest-king, and a Tibetan-descended monarchy was established over a Lepcha and Limbu population. The modern period begins in 1817 with the Treaty of Titalia, which restored to Sikkim the land the Gorkhas had taken and made the kingdom dependent on the East India Company to keep it. Everything afterwards follows from that dependence: a grant of hill territory in 1835, a hill station, tea, and a labour migration that within two generations made Nepali the common language of a country whose court spoke Sikkimese. The two halves of the region then diverged politically - Darjeeling and Kalimpong became a British district, Sikkim remained a protected kingdom outside British India - and stayed that way until 1947.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
प्राचीनprehistory – c. 13th century
The Lepcha are the earliest inhabitants recorded on this ridge, with Limbu and Magar communities in the western and southern country. Lepcha tradition names the land Mayel Lyang and Kanchenjunga as its ancestor and guardian, and remembers authority in the hands of a Panu, a chief who was also a ritual figure, rather than of a dynasty. There is no state here in this period and no written record produced within the region; the earliest narratives were set down centuries later by Buddhist chroniclers with their own interests. The association of Padmasambhava with the country - said to have passed through and consecrated it in the eighth century - belongs to that later Buddhist tradition rather than to contemporary record, but it is the charter on which the seventeenth-century monarchy rested its claim.
मध्यकालीन1642 – 1817
In 1642 three lamas consecrated Phuntsog Namgyal, a fifth-generation descendant of Khye Bumsa, as Chogyal at Yuksom. The state that resulted was small, monastic in character and permanently squeezed: Bhutan pressed from the east, Nepal from the west, and Tibet was both patron and overlord. The capital moved as the pressure moved - from Yuksom to Rabdentse under Tensung Namgyal in 1670, and eventually to Tumlong when Rabdentse proved too close to the Nepal frontier. The Gorkha expansion of the 1780s was the worst of it; Sikkim lost Limbuan and its capital, and the Chogyal took refuge in Tibet. What survived through all of this was the monastic establishment rather than the court, which is why the region's cultural continuity runs through gompas and their calendars rather than through palaces.
आधुनिक1817 – 1947
The Treaty of Titalia in 1817 gave Sikkim back the land Nepal had taken and gave the East India Company a client on the Tibet road. Eighteen years later the Chogyal granted a strip of hill territory around Darjeeling, which the Company wanted as a sanatorium, and the consequences of that grant reshaped the entire ridge. Archibald Campbell, superintendent from 1839, planted tea experimentally in the early 1840s; by the 1850s commercial gardens were spreading along the south-facing spurs, and the labour they needed came from the eastern Nepal hills in numbers that eventually made Nepali the majority language of Darjeeling and, in time, of Sikkim. Two annexations followed - the terai and Morang in 1850, after the Sikkim court detained two British officers, and the hill tract east of the Teesta including Kalimpong in 1865, taken from Bhutan - and by 1890 Sikkim was formally a British protectorate. Anti-colonial politics in the hills came late and took an unusual shape, because the district was a plantation economy with a migrant workforce and the kingdom next door was not British territory at all.
शासक और सेनापति
Thekong Tek Panu (Lepcha chief-priest) शासक pre-monarchic, undated
The Lepcha authority remembered in tradition as the counterpart to Khye Bumsa at Kabi Lungchok. He is important less as an individual than as evidence of what preceded the monarchy: Lepcha society was organised under a chief who was simultaneously a ritual specialist, with clan elders beside him, and not under a hereditary dynasty. Everything about him comes from oral tradition later written down by Buddhist chroniclers.
राजधानी: the Teesta and Rangeet country
Khye Bumsa Prince of Minyak संस्थापक c. 13th–14th centuries (tradition)
A prince from Kham in eastern Tibet whose descendants five generations later became the Chogyals. The blood-brotherhood he is said to have sworn with Thekong Tek at Kabi is the founding story of the Bhutia and Lepcha relationship and is marked by standing stones; it is tradition rather than record.
राजवंश: ancestor of the Namgyal line. राजधानी: Chumbi valley
Phuntsog Namgyal Chogyal संस्थापक 1642–1670
Consecrated by three lamas at Yuksom in 1642 as the first priest-king. The state he founded was governed jointly through a monastic and a lay establishment, which is why the monasteries outlasted every political arrangement that followed.
राजवंश: Namgyal. राजधानी: Yuksom
Tensung Namgyal Chogyal शासक 1670–1700
Moved the capital from Yuksom to Rabdentse, the ruins of which above Pelling remain the clearest physical record of the early kingdom.
राजवंश: Namgyal. राजधानी: Rabdentse
Tshudpud Namgyal Chogyal शासक 1793–1863
Returned from exile in Tibet after the Gorkha occupation and moved the capital to Tumlong. His grant of the Darjeeling tract to the East India Company in 1835 is the single most consequential act in the region's modern history, and almost none of its consequences were foreseen by anyone who signed it.
राजवंश: Namgyal. राजधानी: Tumlong
Thutob Namgyal Chogyal शासक 1874–1914
Ruled through the period in which Sikkim's independence was extinguished in practice - detained by the British in the 1890s, restored, and reigning under a Political Officer. The capital was moved to Gangtok in 1894 during his reign. He and his queen Yeshe Dolma compiled a history of Sikkim, the fullest account the kingdom produced of itself.
राजवंश: Namgyal. राजधानी: Tumlong, then Gangtok
Archibald Campbell Superintendent of Darjeeling प्रशासक 1839–1862
Built Darjeeling as a station and began the tea experiments about 1840 that became the district's entire economy. He also encouraged the migration from eastern Nepal that supplied its labour, which is the origin of the region's present demography.
राजवंश: East India Company administration. राजधानी: Darjeeling
John Claude White Political Officer in Sikkim प्रशासक 1889–1908
The first Political Officer, who ran Sikkim's administration for nearly twenty years while the Chogyal reigned. Gangtok as an administrative capital, the cardamom and orange export trade and the road system over the Nathu La and Jelep La all date from his tenure.
राजवंश: British administration. राजधानी: Gangtok