On Saturday, the border trade route through Nathu La pass in the eastern Himalayas reopened, six years after India closed it. The pass sits at more than 4,300 meters (14,108 feet) on the border between Sikkim and Tibet, where yak caravans once carried silk and salt between empires. It was shut in 2020, when the pandemic and the deadly clashes at Galwan Valley pushed India-China relations to their lowest point in decades.
The reopening was agreed in advance. It follows the 24th round of the India-China Special Representatives’ dialogue in August 2025, when National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed to restore border trade through three Himalayan passes: Nathu La in Sikkim, Shipki La in Himachal Pradesh and Lipulekh in Uttarakhand. It follows, too, the meeting between External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and Wang Yi in Manila on July 22, which focused on border peace and practical cooperation. The pass is a dividend of what analysts call a slow, cautious and calibrated stabilization, not a breakthrough.
The history of the route is a history of the relationship in miniature. Nathu La was open for centuries until the 1962 Sino-Indian war closed it for more than four decades. It reopened in 2006, the result of patient diplomacy rather than commercial demand, and trade resumed on a modest, seasonal basis. Then came 2020: the pandemic, the border buildup in eastern Ladakh, and the hand-to-hand fighting in the Galwan Valley that left soldiers dead on both sides. The pass closed again.
The scale of what resumed is small. Around 600 registered Indian traders depend on the route, which carries the goods of a mountain border: local products, foodstuffs and small manufactures, exchanged over a short trading season at an altitude that punishes every shipment. The tonnage will never rival the ports or the industrial corridors. India’s trade with China is nearing $151 billion a year, with a deficit of around $112 billion, and Nathu La will not put a dent in either number. The border dispute itself, the patrols and the troop numbers along the Line of Actual Control, remains unresolved.
What the pass does is different and harder to measure. It gives the traders, drivers and porters of Sikkim’s border districts a living that depends on a calm border. It gives local businesses access to commercial activity that is otherwise unsustainable in remote mountain districts. It gives both governments a working example of cooperation in the middle of a relationship built on suspicion. A new highway between Rongli and Menla is already under construction to improve access to the pass.
The mountain did not move. The politics did, a little. Trade will not resolve the boundary question. But the reopening of Nathu La is a small bet that economics can outlast enmity: that the people who live on the border and depend on the pass are a constituency for peace, and that every convoy that crosses it makes the next negotiation a little less likely to fail. The pass has been closed by wars before. For now, it is open, and the caravans are moving again.