Arunachal Pradesh

I chose, as most first-timers must, the road west to Tawang, two days of driving that function as a compressed autobiography of the eastern Himalaya. Up through Bomdila's monastery town; over Sela pass at four thousand-plus metres, its dark lake lying in the rock like held breath, prayer flags shredding themselves faithfully into the wind; and down the far side past Jaswant Garh, where the road itself pauses. Here, in the 1962 war with China (the wound this frontier still carries under everything) rifleman Jaswant Singh Rawat of the Garhwal Rifles held his position through the battle of Nuranang, and the army has never taken him off duty: his memorial bunker is staffed round the clock, his bed made, his boots polished, meals laid out daily, and every passing vehicle stops (buses, generals, Sumos full of travellers) for tea served by soldiers who speak of him in the present tense. I drank the tea in the cold wind with the driver and a busload of pilgrims bound for Tawang, all of us silent in the particular way of that place, and understood something about this frontier: it remembers with discipline, the way Ladakh's passes remember with flags.

Tawang town clings to its ridge at three thousand metres, and above it stands the reason the valley matters to half of Asia: the Tawang monastery, Galden Namgey Lhatse, 'celestial paradise of the clear night', founded in 1680, the largest monastery in India and among the largest of Tibetan Buddhism anywhere: a walled town of whitewashed residential quarters for hundreds of monks, a library of treasured scriptures, and an assembly hall where an eight-metre gilded Buddha receives the butter-lamp light of three and a half centuries.