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The story of Sikkim’s last king and queen reads like a fairy tale gone wrong

Glamour, romance and a deposed monarch are vividly evoked in Andrew Duff’s nostalgic history of the beleaguered Himalayan former kingdom

1 August 2015

9:00 AM

1 August 2015

9:00 AM

Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom Andrew Duff

Birlinn, pp.388, £25, ISBN: 9781780272863

Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I was there once in April, when the sky was cornflower blue. When Britain withdrew from India the last ‘Chogyal’, or king, battled for his country’s independence, but Mrs Ghandi won the war, and Sikkim is an Indian state now.

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