Sikkimese

The Sikkimese are a Tibetan people of the high valleys around Yuksom. Small groups crossed the Himalayas from Tibet from the eighth century, and the flow quickened in the thirteenth century with the clans led by Khye Bumsa. They speak Sikkimese and follow the Nyingma and Kagyu schools of Vajrayana Buddhism.

Tibetan settlers overcame the chiefs of the earlier Lepcha inhabitants with the help of Nyingma lamas. In 1642 Phuntsog Namgyal, a fifth-generation descendant of Khye Bumsa, was consecrated at Yuksom as the first Chogyal, founding the Namgyal dynasty, which ruled from Rabdentse from 1670.

Gorkha armies sacked Rabdentse in 1788 and Bhutanese raids narrowed the kingdom still further; after the Anglo-Nepalese War the British drew Sikkim into their orbit and took Darjeeling in 1835, while waves of Nepali settlers gradually made the Sikkimese one people among several in their own valley.