Tawang

Tawang was Tibetan country for centuries, part of the Tawang Tract that the McMahon Line of 1914 placed in India and that Indian administration reached only in 1951; the sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, was born at Urgelling just below the town in 1683, and the fourteenth passed through here on his 1959 escape. The monastery, Galden Namgey Lhatse, was founded in 1680 to 1681 by Merak Lama Lodre Gyatso at the wish of the fifth Dalai Lama, and its whitewashed walls hold some 450 monks, a three-storey dukhang with an eight-metre gilded Buddha, and a library of Kangyur scriptures written in gold. Getting there is the journey: two days up from the Assam plains through Bomdila and Dirang, over the 4,170-metre Sela Pass where prayer flags snap beside a black lake, and down past the Jaswant Garh memorial to a rifleman of 1962 and the Nuranang waterfall roaring beside the road.

A day in Tawang begins with the low chant of morning puja and butter lamps in the dukhang, continues by shared Sumo to Bumla on the China border and Sangetsar Lake, where drowned pines stand in water created by a 1950 earthquake, and ends at the war memorial as the sound-and-light show comes on and the cold drops hard. Monpa houses, the Ani gompas above town, yak herds on the passes and the Torgya cham dances of January make it more than a viewpoint. Tawang is the far edge of Buddhist India, and it feels like it.