Two nineteenth century trade routes in the eastern Himalayas: The Bhutanese trade with Tibet and Bengal

From the early modern era, Bhutan had been carrying out regular caravan trade on the rugged Himalayan terrain with Bengal on the south and Tibet on the north. This is evident in the contemporary Bengali literature, which refers to several Bhutanese commodities, and also in the writings of foreign travellers. In 1626, a foreign traveller noted that Bhutan was "well provided with Chinese merchandise such as silk, gold and porcelain", and those came through Tibet. According to an eighteenth century document, her annual trade was worth of Rs 200 thousand with Bengal and Rs 150 thousand with Tibet, including China. The trade continued, and perhaps flourished, during the nineteenth century. In this century, we are told of an annual event of Bhutan's royal caravan going to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and also her trade with Rangpur, a business city of contemporary Bengal. The trade seems largely to be of a transit character since several export commodities - salt, gold, tea, pearls and corals, for example - were not of Bhutanese origin. Both Bengal and Tibetan goods could be noticed in either route along with Bhutanese commodities. The transit nature of this trade came in the limelight when the British administration in Bengal temporarily sealed the Bhutan border. It jeopardised the Bhutanese trade with Tibet and China since "in truth the Bhuteahs have nothing to give in exchange for the commodities of other countries." It is highly probable, therefore, that the Tibetan and Chinese traders could be seen in the Bhutan-Bengal route, and the Bengali traders in the Bhutan-Tibet route. In fact, a sixteenth century merchant Ralph Fitch noted in his travelogue the movement of Chinese caravans in the Bhutan-Bengal trade route. In this background, the present article seeks to identify the routes of trade between Bhutan on the one hand, and Tibet and Bengal, on the other. It discusses various travel characteristics in these routes, and describes their origins, destinations, nodes and links, as defined in an earlier article. Data and information available in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century reports of various British political missionaries like Bogle (1774), Turner (1783), Bose (1815), Griffiths (1837-38), Pemberton (1837-38) and Eden (1863-64) have been used. There are four parts in what follows. The first two parts concentrate on the details of the Bhutan-Tibet route and its travel characteristics, respectively. The following two parts deal with the similar descriptions of the Bhutan-Bengal route.