Buxa Fort is located at an altitude of in the Buxa Tiger Reserve, in the Kalchini CD block in the Alipurduar subdivision of the Alipurduar district, in West Bengal, India. It is located from Alipurduar, the nearest town. The Bhutan King used the fort to protect the portion connecting Tibet with India, via Bhutan. Still later during the unrest in the occupation of Tibet, hundreds of refugees arrived at the place and used the then abandoned fort as a place of refuge. History Its origin is uncertain. Before the occupation of the fort by the British, it was a point of contention between the King of Bhutan and the Cooch Kings. British occupation The British on invitation of the Cooch King intervened and captured the fort which was formally handed over to the British on November 11, 1865 as part of Treaty of Sinchula. The British reconstructed the fort from its bamboo wood structure to stone structure. The fort was to later be used as a high security prison and detention camp in the 1930s; it was the most notorious and unreachable prison in India after the Cellular Jail in Andaman. Nationalist revolutionaries belonging to the Anushilan Samiti and Yugantar group such as Krishnapada Chakraborty were imprisoned there in the 1930s. Forward Bloc leader and ex-Law Minister of West Bengal, Amar Prasad Chakraborty, was also imprisoned at Buxa Fort in 1943. Besides, some communist revolutionaries and intellectuals like Nirad Chakraborty, Shibshankar Mitra and Satish Pakrashi. The poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay was also imprisoned here in the 1950s. Later he gave a vivid description of this jail in one of his stories - মেঘের গায়ে জেলখানা (Megher Gaye JailKhana) in his আমার বাংলা কাব্যগ্রন্থ। Tibetan refugee crisis Drepung was one of the most celebrated monasteries in Tibet, and with over 10,000 monks before the Chinese invasion. But in March 1959, Chinese troops tasked with quelling the Tibetan uprising moved aggressively against the monastery; Only a few hundred monks escaped to India. These expatriate monks, representing all the diverse Tibetan orders, first set up a monastic study center and refugee camp in Buxa Fort, on the grounds of the jungle-bound former prison camp. In 1966, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs was alerted to the conditions of the Buxa refugee camps, and it became apparent that the Tibetan refugees would have to be relocated to a more hospitable place. Initially reluctant, a message