Ilam

Ilam's name comes from Limbu words usually glossed as "twisting road", and the country around it was part of Limbuwan, the Limbu chiefdoms of far-eastern Nepal that were absorbed into the Gorkha state in the 1770s. The settlement grew as a bazaar on a trading route between the hills and the plains, and as an administrative centre for one of the most remote districts of the kingdom, a month's walk from Kathmandu but only a few days from the markets of Bengal.

Tea made its name. Planting began in the 1860s, shortly after the first estates were laid out in Darjeeling on the other side of the ridge, and the Ilam Tea Estate became Nepal's first commercial garden. For a century production stayed small and was bound up with the Rana administration; a state body, the Nepal Tea Development Corporation, was set up in 1966, and its plantations and factories were privatised in 1997, after which thousands of smallholders began planting their own bushes and selling green leaf to private factories. The district now produces the greater part of Nepal's orthodox tea, much of it sold through India.

The twentieth century brought a road, a district headquarters and schools, and also long-running emigration: Ilam families have supplied soldiers to the British and Indian armies and workers to the Gulf and Malaysia. Nepal's political upheavals reached the hills as elsewhere — the Maoist conflict from 1996 to 2006, the end of the monarchy in 2008, and the federal reorganisation that made the east into Koshi Province. Tourism arrived slowly, driven at first by Nepali visitors coming to see the tea gardens for themselves.

The district is ethnically mixed even by Nepali standards. Limbu and Rai communities, whose Kirat religion centres on the oral Mundhum, ancestor worship and the spirits of land and forest, live alongside Brahmin and Chhetri households, Newar traders in the bazaar, Tamang, Magar, Sherpa and Lepcha families and a long-settled population with ties across the border in Darjeeling and Sikkim. Nepali is the shared language; Limbu, Rai languages and Nepal Bhasa are heard at home.

Festivals follow both calendars. Dashain and Tihar empty the bazaar as families gather in the villages, while the Kirat Ubhauli and Udhauli mark the start and end of the farming year and are danced as sakela, a circle dance to drum and cymbal that imitates the movements of ploughing and harvest. The Limbu chyabrung drum and the dhaan naach, a paddy dance performed by linked lines of young men and women, belong to this corner of the country.

Ilam is also culturally close to Darjeeling, and that shows in its tea shops, its music and its taste for Nepali-language writing from across the border. The town has produced writers and singers out of proportion to its size, and local identity rests on three things: tea, the cardamom and dairy economy of the hills, and the view of Kangchenjunga that appears on clear winter mornings.

About 50,000 people live in Ilam Municipality, a few thousand of them in the bazaar itself and the rest in surrounding wards of farms and tea gardens. The town is the administrative and market centre of the district: government offices, a hospital, a campus of the national university system, banks, tea traders and the bus park that links the hills to the plains.

The economy is agricultural and export-facing. Tea is the best-known crop, grown both on estates and by smallholders who sell green leaf to factories, and it is joined by large cardamom, of which Nepal is the world's leading producer, ginger, broom grass, potatoes, milk and cheese. Money also arrives from relatives working in India, the Gulf and Malaysia, and from army pensions.

Days begin early, with milk and leaf collection, school runs and the first jeeps down the hill. The weekly haats in Fikkal and other roadside towns are social occasions as much as markets. The persistent problems are the state of the hill roads, landslides in the monsoon, young people leaving for the plains and abroad, and the price paid for green leaf, which has caused repeated disputes between smallholders and factories. Nepali domestic tourism, drawn by the tea country, has become a small but steady source of income.

Tea is the obvious starting point. Ilam produces orthodox leaf, hand-processed in the style of Darjeeling and sold as loose leaf, alongside the stronger CTC tea that goes into everyday cups. In homes and shops it is usually drunk as chiya, boiled with milk, sugar and often ginger or cardamom, while the finer orthodox grades are largely exported and can be bought at the gardens and in bazaar shops.

The hill kitchen is otherwise Nepali with eastern additions. Daal bhaat is the daily meal, rice with lentils, seasonal vegetables and pickle, often with gundruk, fermented leafy greens, dried and cooked into a sour soup, and tama, fermented bamboo shoot. Dhido, a stiff porridge of millet or maize, is eaten with meat or greens in the villages. Kinema, fermented soybeans with a strong smell, is a Rai and Limbu speciality cooked as a thick curry, and sukuti, dried buffalo or goat meat, is fried with chilli and onion.

Dairy shapes the local snack list: the hills make cheese and chhurpi, the hard smoked curd chewed slowly, or a softer version cooked with vegetables. Momo and thukpa are everywhere, reflecting the Tibetan and Himalayan influence. Tongba, fermented millet in a wooden pot topped with hot water and sipped through a bamboo straw, is the Limbu drink of the east, along with local raksi distilled at home.