That bit on the ‘messy map’, the corner around Kalimpong, has been on edge in more senses than one. During the Doklam crisis of 2017, as China and India faced off against each other, the tension of a looming skirmish—if not full-scale war—radiated through this junction between China, Nepal, Bhutan and the former Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. This tense dynamic rumbled over into a replay in the Galwan Valley standoff in May–July 2020, as skirmishes were also reported during July–August on the border between Sikkim and China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

Anxieties flared up in Kalimpong. Kalimpong, after all, is a privileged prism, a unique entry point for looking not only at the India and China undercurrents but also at China in India. This introductory chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow in this book. While the events covered in them start in the 1910s but are mainly between the 1940s and early 1960s, this overture attempts to corroborate the longer history of how Kalimpong was intimately connected to the northeastern border leading into Tibet and China. This history is largely inaugurated by British frontier anxiety as well as the lure that Tibet as a ‘forbidden’ land held for the colonial imaginaire in its singular way of living, seeing and making of the world. Thus, the ‘opening’ of Kalimpong along with the ‘opening’ of Tibet is recounted in this chapter, first in the section on frontiers and Lord Curzon (1859–1925) and then in the section on survey, settlement and Charles Bell (1870–1945).