High Frontiers: Dolpo and the Changing World of Himalayan Pastoralists

I have described Dolpo’s agro-pastoral system largely in a vacuum. Now it is necessary to place the region within its historical, political, and economic context. This sketch of Dolpo’s history, as well as the regional histories I present in chapters 4 and 5, is based on archival research at Cornell University’s Kroch Library. I have puzzled together a rough chronology of regional history in order to understand the transformations that occurred in Dolpo after 1959, and the economic patterns and land-use practices that emerged among pastoralists living in the trans-Himalaya.¹

Dolpo’s early history is linked intimately with Tibet. Together with areas of the upper Kali Gandaki Valley, Dolpo once belonged to the ancient kingdom of Zhangzhung. Located in western Tibet, this kingdom was strongly connected with Bön.² The first Tibetan dynasty (Yarlung) conquered much of the territory that encompasses the Tibetan-speaking world, including Zhangzhung, between the sixth and eighth centuries. Many fled from Zhangzhung and migrated to areas east and south, including Dolpo; the name for this region first appears in written sources at this time.³ These population movements toward Dolpo and the Kali Gandaki may have been fueled by individuals who sought refuge from the feudal debts being extracted by the kingdoms of western Tibet. There are stories within Tibetan Buddhism that tell of hidden valleys (bayul) which serve as refuges for religion. These legends may well have a historical and political dimension, in that areas like Dolpo were “hidden,” on the periphery of early forms of political and financial control in Tibet.

These migrations to Dolpo were part of a wave of successive Tibeto-Burman populations that settled in the habitable valleys of Himalayas. The first settlers of Dolpo probably practiced a mix of religions, from animistic folk traditions, such as cults of mountain gods, to Bön and Buddhist rituals. Buddhists in Dolpo say that Guru Rinpoche (in Sanskrit, Padmasambhava)—the Indian pandit who founded Tibetan Buddhism—discovered the region. Guru Rinpoche, as well as other venerated Dolpo lamas, blazed a trail of legends across the landscape, leaving imprints in the form of footprints (shabje), handprints (chagje), and self-emanated signs in rock (rangjung), which take the form of Buddha figures or other religious signs. Local mythology is rife with tales of great historical figures who subjugated local demons and spirits of the land; these animistic and indigenous spirits were assimilated as wrathful deities to act as protectors of Buddhist and Bön communities in Dolpo.⁴

The first Tibetan dynasty fell in 842 and its western provinces splintered into smaller kingdoms like Purang, which controlled Dolpo until the fourteenth century. These western dynasties developed political structures like those of central Tibet—for example, lamaistic institutions and feudal estates—but they charted their own political course for several hundred years. The cultural and political units of Tibet reflected its ecological divisions. Populations were clustered around larger agricultural valleys like Lhasa and Shigatse, while political borders ran along pastoral or unsettled areas, such as the vast plains of the chang tang.⁵

The staples of Tibetan culture took firm root in Dolpo. Buddhism and Bön became the existential focus of human life, and Dolpo’s denizens eat the same food, respect the same taboos, enjoy the same games, and recite the same chants as their northern neighbors (cf. Spengen 2000). Dolpo also came to share with Tibetans common social institutions such as polyandry, clan exogamy, and the indivisible nature of family property.⁶

However, the regional political power of the western Tibetan dynasties over Dolpo was eclipsed during the fourteenth century by the principality of Lo (in present-day Mustang District, Nepal). Ame Pal, a Tibetan from Ngari, established the kingdom of Lo in 1380 (cf. Peissel 1967; Jackson 1984; Snellgrove 1967; Kind 2003). Ame Pal’s chief village, Lo Monthang, controlled the Kali Gandaki River valley from the current northern border of Nepal as far south as the village of Kagbeni. Lo was an important trade outlet in the western Himalayas, as the convention among Tibetan traders was to bring their salt there and then channel it to various markets in Nepal (including Pokhara and Kathmandu). The Lo dynasty is still recognized by the government of Nepal, and the current raja, Jigme Palbar Bista, is the twenty-fifth king in a patrilineal lineage.

Under the Lo kingdom, Dolpo was organized into four tax units, each divided into ten and a half subunits. Households were taxed in proportion to the amount of seed they planted, a measure of how much land a family owned (cf. Jest 1975; Ramble 1997). Dolpo villagers were also forced to pay tribute to Lo in the form of taxes, labor, and religious service. One manner in which Dolpo’s villagers paid their annual taxes to the kingdom of Lo was in manual labor, carving stone mani walls and painting Buddhist thangka. Thangka are the religious scroll paintings found in monasteries and homes of Tibetan Buddhists. Throughout the Tibetan-speaking world, mani walls decorate the landscape, sanctifying paths and providing opportunities to gain merit for those who circumambulate them. Dolpo-pa would migrate seasonally to Lo to carve these stonewalls, paying taxes by physical religious labor; the longest mani wall in the Nepal Himalayas still stands in the village of Gelling.

A recent documentary on Nova (PBS) attempted to resolve the question: “Who painted the renowned frescoes in the monasteries of Lo Monthang?” The frescoes at Thupchen Gompa, one of Lo Monthang’s largest monasteries, were recently restored through a multimillion-dollar project sponsored by the American Himalayan Foundation. The documentary’s filmmakers speculated that these fresco paintings had been completed by Newari, Tibetan, or Chinese painters. Painters from Dolpo were also responsible for these master works. Tenzin Norbu of Tralung monastery (Tinkyu village) has texts that trace his family’s lineage of artistic service to the Lo crown for more than four hundred years. These biographies relate how lamas from Dolpo spent long periods painting frescoes and constructing monasteries in Lo Monthang. After the Hindu crown absorbed Dolpo, however, taxes were paid in silver or in-kind, in the form of sheep, goats, and other pastoral produce.

Nepal has been a Buddhist-Hindu contact zone for millennia (cf. Aziz 1978). This zone—sometimes called the Indo-Tibetan frontier—formed a broad transitional area of great cultural and economic complexity; it has also been characterized as a region where the writ of government “barely ran at all.”⁷

Pastoralists and farmers living in the trans-Himalayan region were drawn into networks of exchange, cycles that often followed the calendar of religious festivals; as the scale of trade increased, Tibetan fairs assumed a more secular and commercial nature (cf. Spengen 2000). The mutual benefits of trade, as well as venerable traditions of long-distance pilgrimages, brought farmers and pastoralists from the Indo-Tibetan frontier region into contact with one another, linking the Indian and Tibetan economic spheres (cf. Fürer-Haimendorf 1975; Aris 1992). The trade with Tibet kept traders from peripheral regions like Dolpo in touch with the aesthetic and religious culture of their neighbors and afforded them a chance to acquire valuable jewelry, clothing, household goods, and ritual objects. In addition to the barter complex in grains and salt, there was a long-distance trade in luxury goods like musk, medicinal herbs, and precious stones, which initially grew around monastic fairs and places of pilgrimage but came to be focused around regional trade centers like Lo Monthang. Some “luxuries” such as sugar, Indian tea, metal utensils, tobacco, and matches supplemented the grains that were brought from the middle hills of Nepal to exchange for the commodities produced by Tibetan pastoralists (cf. Fürer-Haimendorf 1975; Spengen 2000).

The profitability in these trades depended upon advantageous access to markets and a restriction of competition. Buddhist communities living at the fringe of the Tibetan culture region depended partly on their control over trade routes, and partly on privileges granted to them by local principalities or states, to profit from this trans-Himalayan commerce (cf. Fürer-Haimendorf 1975). West of the Kali Gandaki Valley, where “easy” passes across the main chain of the Himalayas were fewer, long-distance trade was in the hands of a few communities like those of Dolpo, Tichurong, and the upper Mugu Karnali watershed (cf. Jest 1975; Fürer-Haimendorf 1975; Fisher 1986; Clarke 1987; Gurung 1989; Bishop 1990). These high-altitude (greater than 3,500 m) pastoral communities shared a pattern of winter trade in the villages of Nepal’s middle hills and summer trade in Tibet at border bazaars (cf. Bishop 1990; Spengen 2000). Tibetan authorities permitted only traders from Lo and Dolpo to purchase salt in Tibet, while those from regions farther south were allowed to trade only in wool and livestock.

The wealth and power that the trans-Himalayan commerce conferred never accumulated in Dolpo. Dolpo was always too rugged, sparsely populated, and distant from the major passes over the Himalayas to become a significant political entity: it was instead a pawn in the power struggles of competing kingdoms like Lo and Jumla, which sought control of trade routes across the Himalayas. Thus, Dolpo was for centuries a relatively independent region in constant economic and cultural interaction with the greater rival political powers that surrounded it. Rather, it became better known for the asceticism and learning of its lamas, many of whom were trained and taught in monasteries in Tibet. Perhaps the most famous religious export from Dolpo was Sherab Gyaltsen, who in 1309 left Dolpo for Tibet in search of teachers. Twenty years later, he was enthroned head lama of Jonang monastery, where he constructed the largest stupa temple ever seen in Tibet and wrote a series of treatises that “rocked the Tibetan Buddhist world” (Stearns 1999:11).⁸

Dolpo served as a center of religious activity, too. The kings of Lo made yearly pilgrimages to ask for blessings and consecrations from Dolpo’s religious leaders (while their tax collectors were busy calling on villagers).⁹ Not only would Lo’s rule determine Dolpo’s political and cultural milieu for the next several centuries, it would yoke Dolpo’s fate to that of Nepal after the eighteenth century, when the Kali Gandaki became part of the Gorkha kingdom.

The nation-state that would eventually incorporate Dolpo began taking shape in the mid-1700s when the Gorkha tribes and their leader, Prithvi Narayan Shah, consolidated their power, conquering neighbors and working their way toward Kathmandu, which they seized in 1769.¹⁰ The Gorkhas fought a determined series of wars against the western kingdoms of Jumla, as well as the Rai and Limbu groups in the east, to conquer the territory that today defines Nepal’s international borders.¹¹ P. N. Shah and his successors co-opted and absorbed lesser fiefdoms to unite a vertiginous land that spanned from the subtropical jungles of the Gangetic Plain to the highest mountains in the world, a nation of many religions and languages.

The Gorkhas encountered a series of Tibeto-Burman groups in their march across the Himalayas, whose land they gave to Hindu immigrants in order to consolidate their political control. By 1789 the Gorkhas had extended their territorial control over the economically powerful Kali Gandaki Valley and subsumed the Kingdom of Lo. This allowed the king of Lo to keep his title (which his successors still carry today) but forced him to relinquish political power over the Kali Gandaki and surrounding regions. Dolpo thus became the Gorkhas’ without having to fight on its own account. When the Kingdom of Lo succumbed to the Gorkhas, it forfeited administrative power and privilege over Dolpo, and its rite of tithes passed. In the aftermath of absorption by the Gorkha kingdom, Dolpo became even more isolated than its physical remoteness had already made it.¹²

Regionally, Dolpo fell clearly under the penumbra of its more powerful neighbors. Yet its valleys were politically autonomous internally, if only by dint of their isolation. The Gorkhali state was willing to accept regional autonomy in peripheral areas like Dolpo, so long as tributes to the center were dutifully paid. The British Crown’s resident representative in Kathmandu during the nineteenth century described the relationships between Kathmandu and the northern regions:

The inhabitants of these frontier districts pay tax to the Nepal rajahs, to whom they render an immense service by keeping up … the trade of salt, wool, etc. They levy a small tax … and trade a little on their own account, but are generally poor and very indolent. Equally dependent on Nepal and Tibet, they naturally hold themselves independent of both. (Hodgson 1841, cited in Jest 1975)

Though Nepal controlled the external affairs of former principalities like Lo after the eighteenth century (and, by extension, tributary regions such as Dolpo), close cultural relations were maintained between Lhasa and ethnically Tibetan border communities until the 1950s.¹³

There is some confusion as to who controlled Dolpo fiscally after it was absorbed by the Nepali state. During the Gorkha regime, Dolpo fell administratively under the fiscal authority of Tripurakot (Tibtu), and later of Jumla. But records translated by Pant and Pierce show that Dolpo paid taxes to the Nepal king through Thakali subba (from Mustang District) until 1957 (cf. Snellgrove 1992 [1967]; Pant and Pierce 1989; Kind 2003). This splitting of evidence suggests that Dolpo’s eastern valleys (Panzang and Tsharka) transacted their relations with the Nepali state through Mustang, while the southern and western valleys (Phoksumdo, Tarap, and Nangkhong) did so through Jumla.

Having conquered and consolidated their control in Nepal, the Gorkhas were tempted by Tibet—its vast territory, its easy access to China’s markets, and the legendary wealth of its monasteries. Kathmandu’s traditional political view saw Tibet as a militarily weak, self-governing state, and a buffer against intimate and potentially dangerous contact with China. Nepal’s armies ventured north for the first time in 1788 and drew quickly within striking distance of Tibet’s population centers. The Gorkhas were encouraged by sectarian, anti-Lhasa forces to invade Tibet but were persuaded to return south by the Tibetan government, which promised to pay a yearly tribute in exchange for their retreat (cf. Ramakant 1976; Manandhar 1999). The Gorkhas attacked Tibet again in 1791 and seized control of several major passes along the Himalayas, occupied four border districts, and advanced as far as Shigatse, where they sacked the treasury of its main monastery, Tashilumpo.

Nepal’s rulers may have hoped to replace China as Tibet’s nominal suzerain, but the Qing emperor took this attack as a blow to imperial prestige and dispatched a contingent of 15,000 men to Tibet. They succeeded not only in pushing the Gorkhas south of the border but also managed to carry the battle to within twenty miles of Kathmandu itself. The Gorkhas were forced to surrender, and China’s forces withdrew on the condition that Nepal pay a tribute to the Chinese emperor every five years.

Chinese historians have argued that the Nepal-China Peace Agreement (1792) marks Nepal’s acceptance of China’s suzerainty. Nepalese historians counter that the tributary missions did not imply acceptance of Chinese political control. Nepal’s best claim for independence—that it had gone the hard road of statehood alone—was vis-à-vis its relationship with the British Raj. Despite repeated requests, China did not come to the aid of Nepal during the nineteenth-century Anglo-Nepalese wars, violating the provision of mutual self-defense in their agreement. China’s refusal to comply with this important clause forsook suzerain claims. Moreover, neither Nepal nor Tibet gave the Chinese representative in Lhasa (the amban) much of a role as an arbitrator for the disputes they had over the course of the nineteenth century (cf. Ghoble 1986; Grunfeld 1987; Manandhar 1999).

Nepal and China had had a long history of cultural and economic contact, but the Nepal-Tibet wars of the eighteenth century provoked their first direct encounter, militarily and as nation-states, at the Indo-Tibetan frontier.¹⁴ Gorkha militarism had dislocated trade and created instability in the Himalayas. China foiled Nepal’s territorial ambitions in Tibet and gained the right to arbitrate in its disputes with Lhasa. These responses demonstrated that China saw Tibet as an integral part of its frontier security and would respond to any challenge of authority there (cf. Dhanalaxmi 1981; Ghoble 1986; Majumdar 1986). The Gorkhas’ armed gambits helped trigger China’s increasing involvement in Tibet, with repercussions into the present.

The rise of British colonial power in India was also a formative factor in economic and geopolitical developments along the Indo-Tibetan frontier. Like the Chinese, British forces had fought to contain Gorkhali ambitions during the 1800s and succeeded in winning broad concessions from Nepal in exchange for its territorial sovereignty. The East India Company’s primary goal was to keep Nepal stable and allied with economic interests of the British: Nepal served the Raj better as a buffer against China and a supplier of mercenaries (the much-feared Gurkha regiments) than as a colony.¹⁵ The guarantees of cooperation that the British Crown extracted from Kathmandu’s rulers led to its virtual isolation from the world under the Ranas for more than a century.

British and Gorkhali rivalries came to a head chiefly over control of the major trans-Himalayan trade through the Kathmandu Valley and eastern Nepal (cf. English 1985). The Hindu kingdom controlled these traditional routes and imposed heavy customs on goods passing to and from Tibet (via Kutin and Kyirong). The British sought new routes into China to access untapped markets for their manufactured goods. Trade across the central Himalayas had traditionally passed through the Kathmandu Valley, where Newari traders occupied a key position as economic middlemen and cultural brokers in the Kathmandu-Kodari-Gyantse-Kyirong network. Meanwhile, barter trade across the other high passes of the Nepal Himalayas remained in the hands of local populations like those in Lo and Dolpo (cf. Chandola 1987; Chakrabarty 1990; Spengen 2000).

In 1846, Jung Bahadur Kunwar Rana, a member of Nepal’s royal court, engineered the bloody Kot Massacre and seized power by eliminating his enemies and many members of Nepal’s ruling families. This massacre inaugurated a single-family despotism in Nepal that was to last for the next century. Members of the Rana family appointed themselves hereditary prime ministers and kept the crown strictly at bay from political matters.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, China’s Qing dynasty suffered a series of setbacks at the hands of the British Empire. Weakened by a civil war (the Taiping rebellion), the Chinese dynasty was desperately struggling for survival. Seeing China’s weakness, the Gorkhas swept north into Tibet again in 1856 on the pretext of trade violations. Unable to defend itself against a superior force, nor able to rely on its patron China, Tibet was forced to sign a humiliating treaty that promised annual tributes to Nepal and extraterritorial rights for Nepalese living there. After the War of 1856, Nepalese merchants could sell their goods cheaper in Tibet than any other foreigners with their diplomatic immunity and tax-free status (cf. Ghoble 1986; Majumdar 1986; Grunfeld 1987).

Throughout the nineteenth century, Nepal continued to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor every five years, but only because these missions provided wonderful opportunities for trade—notably, the opium trade. In addition to rich gifts for the emperor, the 1852 mission carried opium worth 300,000 rupees, duty-free and under wraps of diplomatic immunity (cf. Majumdar 1986; Bhatt 1996). In 1866, eight hundred Nepalese porters headed off to China loaded with opium to return only after a journey of five years (cf. Uprety 1980; Manandhar 1999). Opium came from the Tarai, Nepal’s southern belt, where its cultivation was regulated by the government: farmers were organized into cooperatives and forced to grow opium and sell it at fixed prices to agents of the government (ryot). The tributes became lucrative trading ventures for Kathmandu’s elite—an opportunity to dispose of a considerable cargo of opium in the western provinces of China without paying heavy maritime duties.

The trade in certain goods, namely opium, was an elite privilege. Luxury trade did not develop infrastructure or industry in Nepal, though, and served to perpetuate the status quo for successive ruling families of Nepal. Subsistence barter between border communities continued, without state intrusion. The intensification of commercial activity along the Himalayan border between 1850 and 1950 allowed some groups to rise, only to see their trade be relocated and reorganized by the British Raj.

By the 1860s, China’s power had decayed so much that it could not enforce its claim to suzerainty over Tibet. Kathmandu’s relationship with China, though defined in terms of “vassalage” by Beijing, never held much political significance for Nepal’s internal politics. However, the Nepalese learned the value of an association with China as a deterrent in their periodic confrontations with the British. Throughout the nineteenth century, Chinese officials considered Nepal to belong to the broader British Empire in India. China resorted to a policy of maintaining the status quo north of the Himalayas and avoided direct involvement south of the mountain range since the costs—financial, military, and political—of intervention across the Himalayas would be too high for the weakened dynasty.¹⁶

Though the Ranas courted the British Raj for the protection afforded by the empire, their trade policies were isolationist. In the 1860s the British began planning alternate land routes to Tibet via western China and India—a direct threat to Nepal’s virtual trade monopoly. By 1877 the British had completed an eastern trade corridor from Siliguri (an Indian railhead in north Bengal), to Kalimpong and through Sikkim (up the Jelep Pass), and into Tibet’s Chumbi Valley (cf. Karan 1976; Ghoble 1986; Chandola 1987; Bishop 1990; Chakrabarty 1990; Khatana 1992; Agrawal 1998; Rizvi 1999; Saberwal 1999). The opening of this new trade route caused a steady decline in the trans-Himalayan trade via Nepal and undermined the extraterritorial rights of Nepali citizens in Tibet. By the turn of the century, Kalimpong had replaced Kathmandu as the leading trade entrepôt for the subcontinent. Since Nepal had no jurisdiction over new routes, Nepal’s erstwhile commercial monopoly in Tibet was gone and Nepal could no longer bully its neighbor at will (cf. Uprety 1980).

Seasonal trade marts and commercial fairs had been part of the economic and cultural landscape of the Tibetan Plateau for centuries, but in this period they flourished (cf. Karan 1976; Spengen 2000). By Tibetan standards, the scattered nomads of southern Changtang prospered from the export of wool to British India. Almost 100,000 bales of wool were shipped by caravan every year before the late 1950s. There was also a lively trade in yak tails, used as ritual fans in Hindu temples in India and for Saint Nicholas beards in Europe. Wool was obtained from the salt-laden flocks visiting the seasonal frontier marts along the Tibetan border. After shearing their sheep and selling them, the nomads returned to Tibet loaded down with grain brought from the other side of the Himalayas.

The Ranas’ self-imposed isolation of Nepal spurred local trade along its northern borders, and communities there came to supplement, and partly replace, the Newar trade across the Indo-Tibetan frontier. These fairs were cosmopolitan by Central Asian standards. The distinguishing feature of these commercial bazaars was their openness to all trade and traders, irrespective of their provenance. As such, they flourished in times of limited political interference and in areas outside effective governmental control—frontier conditions that were satisfied in Tibet and its borderlands.

In China, fairs flourished only in times of disintegration of the central polity. From the moment fresh political unity was achieved, and the Chinese bureaucracy restored to its former efficiency, fairs in the interior of China declined, but remained intact in a few frontier zones. This distinction between India and China (until the rise of the British) may well explain the relative preponderance of fairs along the Himalayan border of Tibet, and their paucity along the Sino-Tibetan one (cf. Spengen 2000).

During the nineteenth century, a trader from Dolpo is likely to have encountered a wide-ranging cast of characters on his journeys, drawn to the Indo-Tibetan frontier by commercial, educational, and cultural opportunities—and the possibility of trading in all manner of goods pastoral. For example, at Gartok (in western Tibet), traders from Hindustan, Ladakh, Kashmir, Tartary, Yarkhand, Lhasa, and China proper gathered every summer (cf. Sherring 1906). The markets were often held after a religious function and were accompanied by entertainment and other forms of amusement.

The economic pull of the British colonial empire in India made itself felt in the Himalayas with the rise of a cohesive infrastructure network, fueled by a bout of road and railway building during the second half of the nineteenth century (cf. Chandola 1987; Spengen 2000). China lagged behind, but transport networks were slowly improved within its empire, too. The greater mobility of goods and people allowed for an intensification of economic activities, especially in the form of marketplaces near major passes over the Himalayas. This focusing of commerce also led to increased regulation of trade fairs by regimes—a succession of centralizing Hindu and Buddhist polities across the Himalayas, motivated to condition regional trade flows by the need to collect revenues for state-building programs (cf. Scott 1998). The Rana regime continued the exploitive and nefarious management of Nepal’s economy and trade by preserving the labor, land, taxation, and legal systems the Shahs had employed (cf. Bishop 1990).

The frontier character of Tibet gave way during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to contending spheres of interest (cf. Majumdar 1986; Chandola 1987; Chakrabarty 1990; Spengen 2000). The British were guided by the desire to secure a well-defined frontier with Tibet and monopolize trade relations across Central Asia. The Chinese could not ignore the presence of the British and accordingly sought to bring Tibet more firmly under the control of the emperor. The British tried to define the borders between Nepal, India, and China—the so-called McMahon line—but contested borders would fuel many of the events that ensued in the twentieth century (cf. Shakya 1999). Historians see the roots of the present disputes over Tibetan sovereignty as growing out of the conflicts left in the wake of the British Empire’s creeping interests into the Himalayas during this period.

In 1854, J. B. Rana promulgated the Muluki Ain, a national caste system and set of codes that was used to legitimate Nepal’s political identity, unify internal administration, and establish a cohesive legal system to replace existing regional ones. This caste and ethnic identity system became the primary tool the state used to discriminate between its citizens. J. B. Rana likened Nepal to a garden with many flowers: forty-six castes (jaat) based on occupation, customs (e.g., liquor consumption), language, and geography. Nepal’s rulers were eager to promote and perpetuate a Hindu-based hierarchy, which gave them natural positions of privilege.

Unlike caste systems in India, the Nepalese hierarchy placed the non-Hindu middle hills and mountain groups in a middle-ranking position. Despite their great cultural and social divergence from Sanskritic ideals—meat eating, liquor drinking, Buddhism, to name a few differences—Dolpo’s residents were placed within Nepal’s middle rank when the nation defined its ethnic groups. Ethnic group membership and caste ranking were critical in matters of land tenure and trading rights, and signified economic and political roles in Nepal. Scholars see ethnic relations in Nepal today as the outcome of a historical process of accommodation between ethnic systems and the policies of a centralizing state (cf. Levine 1989). The direct effects of the Muluki Ain were probably few in Dolpo, but these laws dramatically changed the socioeconomic circumstances of non-Hindu ethnic groups in closer proximity to the center, like the Tamang and Thangmi.¹⁷ More importantly for Dolpo’s future, the Muluki Ain provided a legal basis for state-building—a way to claim authority and monopolize territory—which Nepal would leverage in its relations with peripheral populations over the next 150 years.

The rise of the transnational British-Indian economy forced Nepal to consider its economic relations with peripheral northern border areas. To collect revenue from its peripheral areas, Nepal’s kings made contracts with middlemen who controlled access to trade routes in the northern borderlands. As a result, trade privileges were extended to a few ethnic groups by the Kathmandu government for the purposes of assimilating Nepal’s border areas within the project of nation-state building (cf. Vinding 1998; Spengen 2000). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, members of the Thakali and Nyishangba groups obtained customs contracts (laal mohor) from the Nepalese government. These contracts allowed these groups to monopolize the trade in salt and led to the accumulation of great fortunes in the hands of men who held the office of district magistrate (subba).¹⁸

The attitude of the Nepalese government toward the villages of Nyishang (today’s Manang District) stayed virtually unchanged through the first half of the twentieth century: they kept their laal mohar privileges, which guaranteed no customs duties were charged them and coincided with the liberal granting of passports to inhabitants of the district. The king collected a fixed amount of tax as a sign of loyalty to the Nepalese crown while local residents continuously conveyed the impression of a poor and backward district to the authorities—a good example of how central state action may be subverted by a peripheral group (cf. Spengen 2000).

The era of nation-state formation (between 1750 and 1950) would occasion dramatic changes in Nepal’s external relations with China, India, and Tibet. After its emergence as a modern nation-state in the mid-eighteenth century, Nepal faced the formidable problem of preserving its independence amidst two concurrent threats posed by the British in India and the Chinese in Tibet. Politically, Nepal was important to China vis-à-vis its shared border with Tibet. Nepal, in turn, looked upon China as a useful balance to threats to its integrity from India (cf. Rose 1971; Shrestha 1980; Prasad 1989). When its power in Tibet waned or it confronted local opposition, China watched Nepal, lest it become a base from which outsiders could promote their objectives in Tibet. The Chinese also valued Tibet as a buffer against the British, particularly for the densely populated provinces of Szechuan and Yunnan.

Along the Indo-Tibetan frontier, routes of commerce, currencies, available goods, and distribution networks all shifted significantly during Nepal’s state-formation period. If we understand the Indo-Tibetan frontier as a region in flux before 1959, we see more clearly how changes that occurred later were both part of this process and unprecedented departures from it. Though Dolpo remained peripheral to the Nepali state up until the 1960s, the political and economic forces articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would give rise to the dramatic transformations this region experienced in the second half of the twentieth century.