Place · Himalayan pass · India
Nathu La & the Chumbi corridor
The 4,310-metre pass in Sikkim through the Chumbi Valley corridor connecting northeastern India to the Tibetan plateau — one of the key wool-and-tea trade routes between Bengal and Tibet from the 7th century through 1962. Buddhist texts moved north through this corridor; Tibetan traders brought wool, musk and borax south in exchange for Bengal rice, cotton and salt. The Younghusband Expedition of 1903-04 forced open the Chumbi route for British trade with Tibet. The 1962 Sino-Indian War closed the pass to civilian traffic; it reopened for limited trade in 2006. The 1,440-kilometre pilgrim route to Mount Kailash and Mansarovar in Tibet departed from Nathu La.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.390, 88.830 (approximate)
Connections (6)
- Trade routeLumbinī
Nathu La and the Chumbi valley carried wool and tea between Bengal and Tibet, and the same passes carried Buddhist texts, images and monks north for a thousand years. What began in the terai at Lumbini reached Tibet through corridors like this one rather than by any single route, and the traffic ran both ways: Tibetan pilgrims came down to the Indian sites, and Indian teachers went up.
- Site adjacencyKhangchendzonga National Park
Khangchendzonga is a beyul, a hidden land in the Tibetan Buddhist sense — a valley system regarded as a refuge concealed by Padmasambhava for a future time of need — and the Nathu La wool-and-tea route runs over the same watershed a short distance east. Sacred geography and trade route share the ground because both follow the only practicable lines through the range, and the monasteries along the route were built by and for the people who used it.
- Trade routeThiksey Monastery, Ladakh
The Himalayan monasteries and the trade corridors are the same map. Thiksey stands above the Indus on the road between Leh and the passes; the Nathu La route carried wool and tea between Bengal and Tibet and the texts that built the Tibetan canon. Monasteries were built where the traffic was because they lived on it — and because a monastery was the only institution on those roads capable of feeding and housing a caravan.
- Route adjacencyKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
The Bengal terminus of the northern highway sat at Calcutta once the Company moved its headquarters there in 1772, and the Chumbi corridor climbed out of the plain at Nathu La. Together they carried the Bengal-Tibet trade that ran through Kalimpong: jute, cotton and brick tea going up, wool, borax, musk and salt coming down. The Younghusband expedition of 1904 went up the same track, and the trade survived until 1962.
- Trade routeBoudhanāth
Boudhanath stands on the Kathmandu to Lhasa road, the western counterpart of the Chumbi and Nathu La route from Bengal. Both carried wool, salt and brick tea one way and Indian goods and Buddhist texts the other, and both were the physical means by which the Gangetic Buddhist inheritance reached Tibet after the Indian monasteries were gone.
- Alternative toChangthang and the Changpa
Changthang and the Chumbi corridor are the western and eastern ends of the Indo-Tibetan pastoral trade: pashm, salt and borax south, Indian grain and cloth north, moved by herders and by mule caravans rather than by ships. Both routes closed after 1962, and the Changpa's grazing and Kalimpong's wool trade ended in the same decade for the same reason.
On these journeys
Sources
Himalayan trade route studies
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