Most of us are familiar with sister cities and other sister states—-usually, in Jefferson City’s case, a town with similar cultural roots in Germany. Missouri has a sister state relationship with Nagano Prefecture in Japan. Jefferson City’s sister city is Munchberg, Germany.
Missouri, a state, should have this place as a sister CITY for a reason I’ll mention later.
The scenic town is six-thousand feed up in the Himalayan foothills of India, about 180 miles north of New Delhi and is known affectionately as the “Queen of the Hills.”
It’s a Hill Station, a British phrase used to describe a popular tourist town at higher elevations where people who visit to escape the summer heat in the valleys below. Although the phrase has been used in other countries, India has more hill stations than any other country.
The city has been a popular tourist destination since a British miliary officer established it in 1825.
Seven years later, the Surveyor General of India, George Everest, wanted to make it an anchor of the Great Trigonometric Survey that provided a detailed map of the Indian subcontinent.
The what? It was a comprehensive survey that used mathematics to provide a precise map of the whole Indian subcontinent. It was started in 1802 by the East India Company in the days when the British Empire was being put together. The company was created in 1600 as a trading company that at one time controlled the subcontinent and Hong Kong and was the largest corporation in the world—so large that it had its own army of 260,000-man army, double the size of the regular British Army at times. The survey took almost seventy years. Its most important feature was the first measurement of the highest peaks in the Himalayas, including the one named for Surveyor General George Everest.
By the start of the Twentieth Century, the town had about 65-hundred permanent residents. But the population more than doubled in the summers. Among the prominent families to spend summers here were the Nehrus. For a time, the Dalai Lama lived there. The population in the first decade of the Twenty-first century had gone past 30-thouand.
It is said that a good set of binoculars will provide a nice view of the Himalayas
Visitors today can travel on Camel’s Back Road, named for a rocky outcrop that reminds people of a camel’s hump. It’s a popular hiking trail that includes the oldest Christian Church in the Himalaya Mountains, on a nearby road. The snowy peaks of the big Himalayan peaks are visible through binoculars from the road.
The forty-foot high Kempty Falls, one of several waterfalls in the area, is about nine miles from the town, and Lake Mist, where the Kempty river flows, is a popular stop for hikers and other tourists. There’s a municipal garden and a lake where visitors can rent padd boats.
The remains of Sir George Everest’s laboratory are in a park. Happy Valley includes an academy, a municipal garden and a Tibetan sanctuary. An ancient Hindu temple dedicated to the Snake God Shiva is nearby.
And then there is Cloud End, a dense forest, and Van Chetna Kendra, a bird sanctuary that was the last refuge of the now-extinct Mountain Quail.
One of the oldest and most highly-regarded colleges in India, St. George’s College, is there. It’s been run by the Patrician Brothers since 1893.
There’s a lot more to see and to do in the multinational community of Mussoorie, the “Queen of the Hills” of India.
Sounds like an interesting place. Maybe we should get to know it better.
Save me a place on the flight, Governor.