Mayel Lyang: The Hidden Land Behind Sikkim's Oldest Story | Dzongu - North Sikkim
I spent eight years living in Sikkim before I ever thought of it as a subject to write about — long enough that it stopped being a place I was visiting and started being a place with its own memory, its own long list of things nobody had gotten around to telling me yet. Architecture trained me to ask what decision built any structure I stood in front of: a road, a monastery, a border post. Sikkim kept handing me a different kind of structure to ask that question about — a reserve. Not a building. An entire valley, fenced off with a permit slip rather than a wall, set aside since before Sikkim was even part of India, for one community and no one else. I wrote a while back about the old Silk Route through Zuluk and Nathula — a road built for tea, and the border it eventually became. This time I want to take you somewhere quieter, and a good deal older: Dzongu, in the north of the state, where Sikkim's earliest known people still live inside a boundary drawn specifically to protect them, in land they call, in their own language, a hidden and perfect place.
Lepcha women in traditional dress in Singhik, Sikkim — the gateway village to Dzongu (Library of Congress, public domain)
Rongkup — the name older than the state itself
Almost everyone who visits Sikkim learns the word "Lepcha" within a day or two, usually attached to a monastery guide's explanation of who lived here before the kings. What almost nobody learns is that "Lepcha" isn't actually their word. It's an exonym — a name given by outsiders, likely from a Nepali term, that stuck so thoroughly in colonial records and then general use that it eventually became the only name most of us know.
Among themselves, the community calls itself Rongkup, or in fuller form, Mutanchi Rongkup Rumkup — rendered a little differently across sources, but consistent in meaning: the beloved children of the Rong, and of God. One scholarly account glosses it even more specifically as "beloved children of It-bu-mu, who have come from the snowy peaks," It-bu-mu being the creator deity in Lepcha belief. There's a traditional call-and-response cry, Achuley, still used in greeting and affirmation — the kind of detail that tells you a name isn't decorative, it's a whole worldview compressed into a few syllables. I think about that a lot: how much of what we casually call a place or a people is really the label an outsider found convenient, sitting on top of a name that means something else entirely to the people who own it.
Mayel Lyang — the hidden, perfect land
The Lepcha have a name for their homeland too, and it isn't "Sikkim." It's Mayel Lyang, or more fully Nye Mayel Lyang — usually translated as something close to a hidden paradise on Earth. In Lepcha tradition, this isn't a poetic nickname for the state as it exists today. It describes an older, wider Lepcha world, centred on Khangchendzonga, that existed before anyone had drawn the modern boundaries — reaching loosely toward land that is now part of Nepal and Bhutan. Khangchendzonga itself isn't just scenery in this worldview. One account of Lepcha clan cosmology describes the mountain as having risen out of a primordial expanse of water on the creator's instruction, specifically to watch over Mayel Lyang — an elder-brother guardian for the whole community. Each Lepcha clan, in this same tradition, is tied to its own sacred peak, cave and lake, sites that receive ritual offerings every year and are understood as where the soul goes after death. That's not a generic "nature worship" label — it's an intricate, place-specific map of the sacred, with Khangchendzonga at its centre.
Khangchendzonga, Sikkim — the guardian mountain at the centre of Lepcha cosmology
Lepcha oral tradition takes this a step further and says the community itself was formed from the mountain — shaped "from the laps of Mt. Khangchendzonga" by the creator deity, with a first man and woman, Fodongthing and Nazongnyu, as the community's original ancestors. It's a sacred story, and I want to treat it as one rather than dress it up as settled history. But here's what I find genuinely striking: set that legend next to what outside historians have documented, and the two don't contradict each other, they converge. Colonial-era scholars — Hooker, Hunter, Risley — and Sikkim's own tribal research institute today all describe the Lepcha as the state's earliest known inhabitants, present well before the Bhutia arrived from Tibet or the Chogyal monarchy existed. Lepcha oral tradition, tellingly, contains no migration story at all — no account of arriving from somewhere else, the way almost every other community's origin story eventually does. The legend says they were always here. The documented record says, as far as anyone can tell, they were. Two different kinds of proof, landing in the same place.
Bongthing and Mun — healers who never needed a monastery
Long before Buddhism reached these hills with the Bhutia, Lepcha villages already had their own way of handling life's harder edges — illness, death, misfortune. That tradition runs through two kinds of ritual specialist: Bongthing and Mun. Bongthing are male practitioners who train into the role, officiating rites and mediating with local deities and spirits — by tradition, the older of the two lineages. Mun, who can be either male or female, work differently: through trance, understood as being possessed or spoken through by spirits directly, with real knowledge treated as something received in meditation or dreams rather than simply learned. Even a Mun is expected to also know Bongthing methods, out of respect for the older tradition. Both roles usually run in families, and recruitment often follows a personal crisis — understood, within the belief system, as a call from ancestral spirits rather than a career choice.
What I find most telling is what happened when Nyingma Buddhism did arrive. It didn't replace the older tradition — it sat down next to it. Buddhism became the visible, monastery-centred face of religious life in most Lepcha villages, complete with gompas, monks and festivals. But Mun and Bongthing practitioners kept handling the life-cycle and crisis rituals underneath that Buddhist surface, the two traditions typically practised together rather than treated as any kind of contradiction. One academic account of this syncretism even notes that Lepcha belief has proved flexible enough to fold in Buddha and Jesus Christ alike as household deities without abandoning the older framework underneath. Some Lepcha communities have separately taken up Christianity in more recent generations too — a third layer on an already layered picture. It's one of the more honest examples I know of religious life in the Himalaya up close: less a single label, more several things practised alongside each other, in whatever order they arrived.
Kabi Lungchok — the bowl of mixed blood that built a kingdom
If the Lepcha were here first, the next part of the story is about who arrived — and how the two sides decided to share the land rather than fight over it. Sometime in the centuries before Sikkim had a king, Tibetan-origin migrants began moving into the region in real numbers, among them a leader named Khye Bumsa. The accounts I've read agree that Khye Bumsa formed a close bond with Thekong Tek, a Lepcha chief — and sealed it at a site in North Sikkim called Kabi Lungchok, still marked on the ground today, in a blood-brotherhood ceremony. The two men are said to have mixed their blood in a bowl and sworn mutual non-discrimination and peaceful coexistence between their peoples, with local deities invoked as witnesses. Historians disagree on exactly when this happened, but it sits right around the point Khye Bumsa's descendant, Phuntsog Namgyal, was installed as Sikkim's first Chogyal in 1642 at Yuksom — the coronation that founded the Namgyal dynasty and, with it, the kingdom of Sikkim as a political entity.
A Chogyal of Sikkim — the monarchy founded in the era of the Kabi Lungchok pact (Library of Congress, public domain)
I keep coming back to how unusual that origin story is. Most kingdoms here get founded through conquest, or one side simply absorbing the other. Sikkim's founding myth is a peace pact between the people already there and the people who'd just arrived, witnessed by the mountains themselves. Whatever the exact century, Kabi Lungchok is the documented hinge connecting Lepcha-first Sikkim to the Bhutia-led monarchy that followed — the reason Lepcha and Bhutia Sikkim exist side by side in this place's story, rather than one simply replacing the other.
Dzongu — the reserve nobody talks about
Which brings me to Dzongu itself — the part of this story most guests never hear at all. Sometime in the 1950s, under Sikkim's own Chogyal rulers, a decision was made to set aside a stretch of North Sikkim — roughly 78 square kilometres, climbing from subtropical valley floor near 700 metres up to permanent snow above 6,000 — exclusively for the Lepcha community. Non-Lepchas couldn't buy land there or settle permanently. That rule has survived everything since, including Sikkim's 1975 merger into the Indian union, without ever being repealed.
The reasoning, from what I've read, wasn't purely administrative. By the 1940s, Sikkim was changing fast — cardamom had arrived as a cash crop, pulling in new cultivation and settlement, and Lepcha communities who had historically moved fairly freely across a much wider, unmarked homeland were suddenly exposed to land pressure and the kind of slow cultural erosion that comes with it. Setting Dzongu apart was, in effect, a decision to formally protect one piece of that older, larger Lepcha world so it could keep functioning as Lepcha land and Lepcha life, even as everything around it hardened into borders and ownership.
Today, thirty-eight villages sit inside Dzongu, and the practical effect of that decades-old proclamation is still exactly what it sounds like: you need a permit to enter, a requirement that applies to outsiders generally — including other Sikkimese, not just visitors from further afield. Upper Dzongu holds Tholung Monastery, a Nyingma monastery that, as the story is usually told locally, was recognised as sacred ground in 1760 and built a few decades later, and which has quietly guarded relics kept safe there since the Gorkha invasions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I find that detail hard to improve on as a description of what Dzongu still is, nearly seventy years on: a place built to keep something safe, still doing exactly that.
Dzongu — come see it for yourself
I don't think Dzongu needs embellishing to be worth visiting. It already has a name that means hidden paradise, a people who trace themselves to the mountain watching over it, healers older than the monasteries built beside them, and a peace pact that quite literally founded a kingdom. What it asks of you in return is a little patience — a permit, a slower pace, a willingness to be a guest in someone else's oldest home rather than a tourist ticking off a viewpoint. That's the kind of trip I want to keep building. If this is the version of Sikkim that speaks to you — the one behind the view, not just the view itself — come find us on Curated Experiences, where our Sikkim itineraries live, or just write in and we'll figure out the route together. Come travel to Sikkim with us.
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