View from St. Pauls School, Darjeeling

Well known as a summer resort during the British Raj, Darjeeling was one of the many hill-stations favoured to escape the Indian summer. But more importantly, it commanded entry to neighbouring regions, Nepal and Bhutan,  serving as a strategically important outpost for the British.

The word Darjeeling comes from ‘dorje ling’ which means a place or land of the Thunderbolt (Indra’s thunderbolt). Known for its tea, Darjeeling has only eighty-seven tea estates, that is around 19,500 hectares. They generate only a fraction of the tea in the world, less than one per cent of India’s total. Yet the tea from this same limited crop is one of the most known and a flag-bearer of Indian teas abroad.

The Kanchenjunga Mountain looms sharply in the background in this photograph of the town taken from St. Paul’s School in 1913.