Royal Records: A Catalogue of the Sikkimese Palace Archive.

The achives of the Sikkimese Royal Palace were transfered to the custodianship of the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology (NIT) in November 2008, having previously being held by the Art and Cultural Trust of Sikkim. This collection of legal documents, letters and international agreements, is a rare source of information for the study of Sikkimese, Tibetan, Bhutanese and British Indian history. This collection covers a range of historical periods, from the time of early Sikkimese state formation in the mid seventeenth century (the earliest document is dated 1663), the Sikkim-Gorkha war of the 1780s and 1790s, the British period c. 1817-1947, to the merger of Sikkim with India in 1975. The collection also contains documents written in a number of different languages including Tibetan (the majority of the material), Lepcha, English, Nepali and Mandarin. Similarly they range in format from letters, treaties, decrees and land grants to personal note books, receipts and private letters. In order to guide scholars through the documents in this collection we have compiled this catalogue, providing brief but important synopsise for each document.