Bhutanese Mail Route Of Yore: Yatung-Nathula Pass-Sikkim-Kalimpong III

It turns out that the history of philately in Bhutan is ten times murkier than that of our coinage. It is one truly tangled world – one that appears to have been shaped and molded by characters mostly clad in grey. But I will get to that later – for now there appears to be a need to reassess and bring clarity to the matter concerning what has been told so far, about how our mail was delivered over Yatung and Nathu-La Pass, on to Sikkim and from there on to Bhutan House, Kalimpong.

I have been brooding over it for the past two days – and somehow I believe that that narrative is not tenable. It just simply does not gel!

First and foremost, we neither had post offices nor a postal service  in place then – during the 1950s.

Second, one sticks a stamp – whether revenue or postage - onto a cover only when the cover is intended to be carried through the postal network.

Third – the covers you see above supposedly sent over the Nathula Pass had been stuck with additional Indian and Chinese postage stamps – supposedly at Yatung. The question then arises: who stuck the postage stamps at Yatung and even more important – who paid for them?

Fourth – the addressees of the covers are private individuals with incomplete delivery addresses such as: Pasang Lama C/O D S Lama, Kalimpong. Does a letter get delivered with that kind of address – particularly to a highly populated place like Kalimpong? I don’t think so.

As we know, we used postal runners to deliver mails internally. Thus it could be argued that we used postal runners to deliver the mails upto Yatung Post offices of the Indians and the Chinese. This argument would not hold water since if we used postal runners, where was the need to stick a revenue stamp on the cover? Postal runners can carry the mails without the need for postage. And even more important, postal runners were not used for private mail – only official mails.

Look at the following Post Card – it is surreal, to say the least! Consider:

The Post Card is the second issue by Bhutan P&T – I think sometime in 1969 – the first was issued in 1966;

The sender sends the Season’s Greetings on 01.05. 1981;

The postal cancellation is dated 02.05.1981;

Strangely a revenue stamp of 1954 is affixed when we had already released our postage in 1962 - nineteen years before the Post Card was posted. By 1981, revenue stamps should have been disallowed to be used as postage but I am told they were still used, sporadically.

Thus I have concluded that there is something fishy about these covers over the Nathu-La Pass. In my next article in the coming days, I will try and bring some facts to light, which hopefully will enable the readers to assess the matter in a more objective light.