I grew up and went to school in the multi-culture of Kalimpong—the town that is the focus and main protagonist of this book. My father, a trader-adventurer, landed up in Kalimpong from Rangpo, a town across the border in the Kingdom of Sikkim, which was then a British protectorate. His father in turn had been working in Singtam (also in Sikkim) for a firm with connections to Kalimpong. This was on the heels of Colonel Francis Younghusband's ‘opening up’ of the route to Tibet in 1904. My father never really made it economically, nor did he sojourn in Lhasa as many businessmen were then wont to do. Coming of age, not without kvetching, in the Tenth Mile area of the town, I noted there was just a residue of the Indo-Tibetan trade, with descendants of merchants using the conduit via Kathmandu while still hoping that the Jelep-La border would one day reopen. The Chinese families still living in the town mainly ran restaurants or shoe shops. Tibetan refugees, lamas and aristocrats had a considerable presence in the town environs. The mule trains were but a distant memory for old timers as army trucks trundled up and down the roads carrying supplies and military hardware.

I remained quite clueless about the potholes in the ground of history on which I daily trod. It was only when I relocated to the United Kingdom (UK) for my doctoral work, on a different topic, that I kept encountering material on Kalimpong in the British Library, London. It was then that the urge to someday write a book on the town took hold of me. This was not a bad beginning for a scholar specialising in postcolonial studies. It was only much later that this work began to take some sort of shape, its contours cut and circumscribed by the continuities and discontinuities of the colonial experience in Asia. Although the Tibetan side of the story at the border had been written about, it seemed to me that what was lacking was the presence of China in Kalimpong, with all that this implied for the larger story of China–India relations before and after 1947.