Spices got the Portuguese to India. Cotton built the British Empire . And Pashmina and Shahtoosh (Chiru wool) from Tibet was one of the main reasons East India Company fought Nepal and got Kumaon, Garhwal and so we now have Dehradun and Mussoorie ! Being exotic has its costs . Less than 75,000 Chiru goats (Tibetan Antelope) are left in the wild, down from a million.In recent years,they have become endangered due to poaching.They are hunted for their soft and warm wool which can only be obtained after death. Pashmina wool comes from changthangi or Pashmina goat, which is a special breed of goat indigenous to high altitudes of the Himalayas in India, Nepal and Pakistan. Chaubisi rajya (Nepali: चौबिसी राज्य) -- literally 24 principalities -- were sovereign and intermittently allied petty kingdoms in the Gandaki River Basin, a major Himalayan tributary of the Ganges. The Shah dynasty was the Rajput ruling dynasty of the Gorkha Kingdom until 1768 and the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of Nepal from 1768 to 28 May 2008. They claim being descendants of Parmara clan of Rajputs. It was the tradition of the local Ghale people to choose as their king for the year the fastest runner in the competition. In 1559, Dravya Shah either attacked and captured Liglig when the inhabitants were engrossed in the race or won the race . He was brother of King Narbhupal Shah of neighboring Lamjung District established the small kingdom .He displaced the Ghale king and became king of Gorkha. From 1736, the Gorkhalis engaged in a campaign of expansion started by king Nara Bhupal Shah. Over the years, they conquered huge tracts of land to the east and west of Gorkha.The three Newar capitals of Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur fell to the Gorkhalis between 1768 to 1769. The Gorkhali king subsequently moved his capital to Kathmandu. The Gorkha dominion reached its height at the beginning of the 19th century, extending all along the Himalayan foothills from Kumaon and Garhwal in the west to Sikkim in the east. They were made to return much of the occupied territories after their defeat in the Anglo-Nepalese War (1814–1816). The Gorkha War (1814–1816), or the Anglo–Nepalese War, was fought between the Kingdom of Gorkha and the British East India Company as a result of border disputes and ambitious expansionism of both the belligerent parties. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Sugauli in 1816, which ceded around a third of Nepals territory to the British. The economic cause constituted the major cause of conflict with Nepal. The British had made constant efforts to persuade the Nepalese government to allow them their trade to the fabled Tibet through Nepal. Despite a series of delegations headed by William Kirkpatrick (1792), Maulvi Abdul Qader (1795), and later Knox (1801), the Nepalese Durbar refused to budge an inch. The resistance to open up the country to the Europeans could be summed up in a Nepali percept, With the merchants come the musket and with the Bible comes the bayonet. Traditionally the Company had bought Indian produce and sold it in London; but this no longer made economic sense. The staple Indian export was cotton goods, and demand for these was declining as home-produced textiles captured the British market. So the Company was having to transfer its assets in another, more complicated and expensive way. It was having to ship its Indian textiles to Canton; sell them on the Chinese market; buy tea with the proceeds; then ship the tea for sale in Britain (all tea at this time came from China. It was not grown in India until the 1840s). So when Hastings told the directors of the Company about an alternative means of remittance, a rare and precious raw material that could easily and profitably be shipped from India directly to London, they were at once interested. The raw material in question was a superior-quality wool: the exquisitely soft and durable animal down that had been used since time immemorial to make the famous wraps, or shawls, of Kashmir. This down was found only on the shawl-wool goat, and the shawl-wool goat was found only in certain areas of western Tibet. It refused to breed anywhere else. David Ochterlony, then an agent at Ludhiana, on 24 August 1814 noted of Dehra Dun as a potentially thriving entrepot for Trans-Himalayan trade. He contemplated annexing Garhwal not so much with the view to revenue, but for security of commercial communications with the country where the shawl wool is produced. The British soon got to know that Kumaon provided a better facility for trade with Tibet. Therefore, the annexation of these two areas became part of their strategic objectives. The Battle of Nalapani was the first battle of Anglo-Nepalese War. The battle took place around the Nalapani fort, near Dehradun, which was placed under siege by the British between 31 October and 30 November 1814.The Treaty of Sugauli was ratified on 4 March 1816. As per the treaty, Nepal lost Sikkim (including Darjeeling), the territories of Kumaon and Garhwal, and most of the lands of the Terai. Nepal kept its sovereignty, but lost territory, had to agree to Gurkha recruitment, and allow a British presence in Kathmandu. The East India Company needed the Himalayan passes in Kumaon and Garhwal for access to precious antelope wool from western Tibet and were not really interested in conquering the rest of Nepal, which it probably considered ungovernable, and wanted to keep us as a strategic buffer against Tibet and China. The Company never did get to profit from the pashmina trade, however, because the raw Chiru wool trade from Tibet was traditionally monopolised by the Kashmiris. Jung Bahadur Rana, who had staged a bloody coup in Kathmandu, became the first royalty from the subcontinent to visit Victorian England and his ulterior motive for the trip was to spy on British military might to gauge whether it was worth going to war to regain lost Nepali territory. He came back suitably impressed and dispatched his army to quell the Mutiny in India in 1857. London disbanded the East India Company and assumed direct control by the British Crown over India. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Nepalese_War en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ nepalitimes/article/nation/The-Pashmina-War,1024 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_antelope en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashmina
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 12:58:13 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015