Nepal's deep history begins in the Kathmandu Valley, a fertile basin that in the geological past was the bed of a lake and that, once drained, became the political and cultural heart of the country for millennia. The earliest inhabitants we have any record of are the Kirati (or Kirant), Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples related to today's Rai and Limbu of the country's east. Tradition has them ruling the valley from around the 8th century BC.
Nepalese chronicles list 29 Kirati kings over more than a thousand years, headed by Yalambar, a warrior king whom legend even links to the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata. It is worth being precise here: this is a semi-legendary period, reconstructed from late chronicles (the vamshavali) and scant firm archaeological evidence, so the dates and names of those kings should be taken with the caution that any tradition passed down over centuries demands.
What is solid is that, when written history truly begins in Nepal, the Kirati had already been pushed from power by another dynasty. Their mark, however, did not disappear: the Kirat remain one of the country's major ethnic groups today, with their own religion, Kirat Mundhum, and a strong identity in the eastern hills.
While the Kirati ruled the valley, on the Terai plain to the south, the event took place that would give Nepal a unique place in the history of religion. Around the 6th or 5th century BC, in a garden called Lumbini, Queen Maya Devi, wife of Suddhodana, lord of the Shakya clan whose capital was Kapilavastu, gave birth to a boy named Siddhartha Gautama. After his enlightenment, that boy would become the Buddha: the 'awakened one', founder of one of the world's great spiritual traditions.
That Lumbini is the birthplace is not just a matter of faith. In 249 BC, the emperor Ashoka, the great Buddhist ruler of India's Maurya Empire, made a pilgrimage there and had a stone pillar erected bearing an inscription in Brahmi script declaring that 'here the Buddha was born' and that the site's taxes had been reduced for that reason. That pillar, rediscovered in the late 19th century, is one of the oldest and most precise pieces of epigraphic evidence on the life of the Buddha. Recent excavations beneath the Maya Devi Temple have even found remains of a wooden structure that may date back to the 6th century BC.
There is legitimate scholarly debate over the exact date: tradition places the birth around 563 BC, but many modern specialists put it later, close to 480 BC. What is beyond dispute is the importance of the place. Lumbini, now a World Heritage Site, is, together with Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar, one of the four great Buddhist pilgrimage sites, and the only one of the four in Nepal.
Around the 4th or 5th century AD, a dynasty of Indian origin, the Licchavi, took power in the Kathmandu Valley and opened what is considered Nepal's first fully historical period, because dated, verifiable inscriptions survive from it. The oldest and most famous is that of King Manadeva I, carved on the pillar of the Changu Narayan temple and dated to AD 464, a document that makes it possible, for the first time, to reconstruct the kingdom's politics with reliable names and dates.
Under the Licchavi, Nepal prospered as a hub of trade between India and Tibet, charging tolls on the caravans crossing the Himalayas. It was an age of refinement: the first great stone temples went up, Sanskrit flourished alongside an emerging Newari, and Hinduism and Buddhism lived side by side without rupture, a symbiosis that still defines Nepalese religious life today. The reign of Amshuverma, remembered as a great administrator and patron, dates from the 7th century.
One of Nepal's most famous connections with its neighbours also comes from this period: tradition holds that the Nepalese princess Bhrikuti was given in marriage to the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo and helped bring Buddhism to Tibet, although the details of the episode rest mainly on late Tibetan sources and are disputed. After the Licchavi came a darker, more poorly documented period, sometimes called 'transitional', that paved the way for the great medieval flowering.
From the 12th century, and strongly from the 14th onwards, the valley was ruled by the Malla dynasty, under which the civilisation of the Kathmandu Valley reached its artistic peak. This was the golden age of the Newar, the people of the valley: craftsmen, merchants and builders whose skill shaped what the world recognises today as Nepalese art. Multi-roofed pagodas, wood carving with lattices and deities, bronze casting, paubha painting: nearly all of it is Newar work from this era. They were so renowned that in the 13th century a Newar master, Araniko, travelled to Tibet and to the court of the emperor Kublai Khan in China, where he spread the pagoda style.
The great king of the period was Yaksha Malla, who ruled from 1428 to 1482 and took the kingdom to its greatest extent. But on his death he made the mistake that would seal the valley's fate: he divided the territory among his heirs. The valley was split into three rival kingdoms —Kathmandu, Patan (Lalitpur) and Bhaktapur— plus the odd minor principality. For almost three centuries, those three courts competed not with armies but with splendour: each king wanted the most beautiful Durbar Square, the tallest temple, the most intricately carved palace.
That aesthetic rivalry explains the valley's urban miracle: three small cities, a few kilometres from one another, each with its own royal square full of temples, palaces and statues. It was a blessing for art and a curse for politics. Divided and jealous, the three Malla cities failed to unite against the threat approaching from the hills to the west.
In the 18th century, the territory of present-day Nepal was a jigsaw of more than fifty small states: the three Malla kingdoms of the valley, the Chaubisi and Baisi confederations of the hills, and scattered principalities everywhere. Among them was Gorkha, founded in 1559 by Drabya Shah, a modest kingdom in the central hills. In 1743 an ambitious young man of extraordinary tenacity came to its throne: Prithvi Narayan Shah, born in Gorkha in 1723.
Prithvi Narayan understood that the prize was the Kathmandu Valley, rich and divided, and he spent more than two decades conquering it. Instead of attacking it head-on, he strangled it: in 1744 he took Nuwakot, on the trade route to Tibet, and gradually closed off the passes and routes that supplied the valley. The campaign included cruel, well-documented episodes, such as the assault on Kirtipur, after whose surrender he is said to have ordered many of its inhabitants mutilated by having their noses cut off, an act of terror meant to break the valley's resistance. On 25 September 1768 he entered Kathmandu almost without a fight, taking advantage of the Indra Jatra festival that had the city distracted; Patan fell that same year and Bhaktapur in 1769. The last Malla king of Kathmandu, Jaya Prakash Malla, lost his throne, and with it ended the Newar's thousand-year rule over their own valley.
Prithvi Narayan Shah moved his capital to Kathmandu and founded the Kingdom of Nepal. He died in 1775, but left a famous warning: that Nepal was 'a yam between two boulders', trapped between imperial China and British India, and that only caution would keep it free. His successors did not always listen: they kept expanding east and west until, decades later, they collided with the larger of the two neighbours.
After Prithvi Narayan Shah's death, the kingdom kept growing under regents and strongmen such as Bahadur Shah and, above all, Bhimsen Thapa. At its height, Nepal stretched far beyond its present borders: west as far as the Sutlej River, in Kashmir, and east as far as the Teesta, in Sikkim. That expansion along the Himalayan foothills set it on a collision course with the British East India Company, which was advancing from the south.
The Anglo-Nepalese War, or Gorkha War, broke out on 1 November 1814 over territorial disputes in the Terai. The British, far more numerous and better armed, expected a quick campaign, but met fierce resistance in the mountains. In the defence of the fort of Nalapani, a handful of Nepalese soldiers under Balbhadra Kunwar held out until they ran out of water and ammunition. That tenacity so impressed the British officers that, even while at war, they began recruiting these highlanders into their own ranks: the Gurkha troops were born, their name coming precisely from Gorkha.
The war ended with the Treaty of Sugauli, signed on 4 March 1816. Nepal lost about a third of its territory —Kumaon, Garhwal, much of the western Terai and its holdings in Sikkim— and agreed to accept a British resident in Kathmandu, the only foreign intrusion it would allow. But it kept its independence: it was never a colony. That treaty gave rise to the borders Nepal claims to this day and to a tradition lasting more than two centuries: that of the Gurkha soldiers, who still serve in the British and Indian armies with their emblematic curved knife, the khukuri, and a reputation for bravery that became legend.
Defeat by the British opened a period of ferocious intrigue at the Kathmandu court, where nobles, queens and generals fought for power behind an ever weaker throne. It ended in a massacre. On the night of 14 September 1846, in the armoury courtyard —the Kot— of the Hanuman Dhoka palace, a young and ruthless general named Jung Bahadur Kunwar and his brothers had some thirty or forty of the kingdom's leading courtiers, ministers and military chiefs killed. In a single night, Jung Bahadur wiped out the entire rival elite.
With power in his hands, Jung Bahadur had himself appointed prime minister and took the nobler surname Rana. He set up an extraordinary system: the Shah king was reduced to a figurehead, shut away in his palace, while the office of prime minister —and the whole government— became hereditary in the Rana family. For 105 years, from 1846 to 1951, Nepal was ruled by this dynasty of prime ministers, which amassed fabulous wealth, built white European-style palaces in Kathmandu and deliberately kept the country closed to the world, without schools or modern roads, so that nothing could threaten its control.
The Ranas cultivated their alliance with the British —lending them Gurkha troops and support at key moments, such as the Indian Rebellion of 1857— and in return kept their autonomy. But the price for Nepal was a century of stagnation and isolation. When the British Empire withdrew from India in 1947, the Rana regime lost its great outside protector, and the pressure for change, held back for generations, began to spill over.
In 1950, King Tribhuvan, a symbolic prisoner of the Ranas, fled to the Indian embassy and from there to New Delhi, becoming the figurehead of the opposition. Backed by the newly independent Indian state and an armed movement of the Nepali Congress party, the revolution of 1951 ended more than a century of Rana rule. On 18 February 1951, Tribhuvan returned to Kathmandu in triumph and power went back to the crown. Nepal was finally opening up to the world.
The democratic promise, however, was slow to be fulfilled. Only in 1959 were the first general elections held, won by B. P. Koirala's Nepali Congress. They did not last long: in December 1960, King Mahendra staged a coup, dissolved Parliament, jailed the leaders and in 1962 imposed the panchayat system, a partyless regime with the monarch at the absolute centre of power. For almost three decades, the monarchy ruled Nepal as a barely disguised personal power.
Democratic pressure erupted again in 1990. The Jana Andolan (People's Movement) —a wave of protests by students, professionals and parties— forced King Birendra to lift the ban on parties and accept a new constitution that made Nepal a multi-party constitutional monarchy. It looked like the happy ending to a century and a half of autocracy. In fact, it was the start of the bloodiest decade in the country's modern history.
Nepal's young democracy proved unstable, corrupt and deaf to the extreme poverty of the countryside, especially in the hills and the remote west. On 13 February 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal 'Prachanda', launched a 'people's war' aimed at overthrowing the monarchy and establishing a communist republic. What began as a rural insurgency became a civil war that would claim more than thirteen thousand lives —by some estimates as many as seventeen thousand— and displace hundreds of thousands of people. There were atrocities on both sides: executions and disappearances at the hands of the state security forces, and killings, kidnappings and forced recruitment of minors by the Maoists.
In the middle of that war came a tragedy that shook the country. On 1 June 2001, at the Narayanhiti palace, Crown Prince Dipendra opened fire during a family dinner and killed nine members of the royal family, among them King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, before shooting himself; he died three days later in a coma. The official investigation named him as the perpetrator, apparently over a dispute about his marriage, but the absence of a trial and the loose ends still feed all kinds of theories today. Birendra's brother, Gyanendra, took the throne in the worst circumstances imaginable.
Gyanendra deepened the crisis: in 2005 he dismissed the government and took direct power, convinced he could defeat the Maoists by force. The effect was the opposite. Political parties and guerrillas, enemies until then, joined forces against the king. In April 2006, a second Jana Andolan of mass protests brought the country to a standstill and forced Gyanendra to hand power back to Parliament. On 21 November 2006, the government and the Maoists signed the Comprehensive Peace Accord, which ended ten years of war.
The peace accord opened the way to the deepest transformation in Nepal's modern history: the end of the monarchy. The Maoists laid down their arms, entered politics and, in the Constituent Assembly elections of April 2008, became the party with the most votes. On 28 May 2008, that assembly abolished the Shah monarchy after 240 years on the throne and declared Nepal a federal democratic republic. The former king Gyanendra left the Narayanhiti palace, which became a museum, and became an ordinary citizen. Prachanda, the former guerrilla leader, became prime minister.
Writing the new constitution took seven years of deadlock, disputes and one assembly dissolved along the way. The main sticking point was federalism: how to draw the map of the new provinces in a country of enormous ethnic and linguistic diversity, with more than a hundred groups and languages. Finally, on 20 September 2015, the Constitution of Nepal was promulgated, defining the country as a secular, republican and federal state, organised into seven provinces, with a ceremonial president as head of state.
The new charter did not satisfy everyone. The Madhesi of the Terai plain, along with other groups, protested that the division of provinces and rights marginalised them, and for months they blockaded the border with India, causing serious shortages of fuel and medicine. The republic was born, like almost everything in Nepal, amid unresolved tensions, but it was born: two and a half centuries of kings had come to an end.
The constitutional process closed under the weight of a catastrophe. On 25 April 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake with its epicentre at Barpak, in Gorkha district —the very place where the country's unification began— shook central Nepal. Around nine thousand people died, more than twenty-two thousand were injured and some eight hundred thousand homes were destroyed or damaged. In Kathmandu the historic Dharahara tower collapsed and the valley's Durbar Squares were badly damaged, with centuries-old temples and palaces reduced to rubble. A magnitude 7.3 aftershock on 12 May made the disaster worse. The international community pledged billions for reconstruction, but it moved slowly and bureaucratically, and many families spent years in temporary shelters.
Nepal thus entered its republican era dealing at once with reconstruction, political instability —governments falling one after another, coalitions breaking apart— and a fragile economy. It is one of the poorest countries in Asia, with a huge share of its population working abroad: in armies as Gurkhas, and as labourers in the Gulf states and Malaysia. The remittances they send home support much of the economy, together with mountain tourism and an enormous hydroelectric potential that has barely begun to be tapped.
Prithvi Narayan Shah's old warning still holds: Nepal negotiates its place day by day between India and an ever more present China, which compete for its favour. But the country that has emerged in the 21st century is also something its kings could never have imagined: a secular and diverse republic, proud to be the birthplace of the Buddha and home to the roof of the world, which after centuries of kingdoms, autocracies and wars is trying, with difficulty, to govern itself.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
North of the Annapurnas, beyond the great barrier of the Himalaya, a different landscape opens up: a desert plateau of ochre cliffs and canyons, in the mountains' rain shadow, that belongs geographically and culturally to the Tibetan world. This is Mustang, and at its heart for centuries stood an independent kingdom: the kingdom of Lo. In 1440 a chieftain called Ame Pal united the small lordships of the upper Kali Gandaki and founded the kingdom, with its capital in the walled city of Lo Manthang, whose four-storey palace was finished in 1441.
Thanks to its position on one of the great trade routes between Tibet and India —carrying salt, wool and grain—, Lo became a small but prosperous military, economic and religious centre during the 15th and 16th centuries. Its religion is Tibetan Buddhism of the Sakya school, and its monasteries —Jampa, Thubchen, Choede— hold murals of extraordinary value. The cliffs are also dotted with thousands of man-made caves, some of them thousands of years old, used as homes, granaries and shrines.
Over time the kingdom of Lo came into Nepal's orbit, although it kept its own dynasty and its king (the gyalpo or raja of Mustang). That title, by then purely ceremonial, lasted until 2008: when Nepal abolished the monarchy and declared itself a republic, it also stopped recognising the last king of Mustang. Closed to foreigners until 1992, the region keeps the air of a world frozen in time, which earned it the nickname 'the last forbidden kingdom'.
The geography of this region is dominated by the Kali Gandaki River, which runs between the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri massifs —two eight-thousanders— forming one of the deepest gorges in the world: at its deepest point, the summits rise more than five kilometres above the riverbed. For centuries that natural corridor was the great route across the Himalaya between Tibet and the plains of India.
Down that route came salt from the Tibetan plateau, and up it went grain and goods from the south. The trade made the fortune of the Thakali, the people of the Kali Gandaki valley, skilled traders and innkeepers who controlled the caravan traffic and whose stone-and-timber houses still line the trail. Along the riverbanks people also collect shaligram, ammonite fossils revered by Hindus as a manifestation of the god Vishnu, which turned the area into a pilgrimage route, with the shrine of Muktinath as its great spiritual goal, sacred to Hindus and Buddhists alike.
That old caravan trail is today the backbone of one of the most famous trekking regions on the planet. Much of the legendary Annapurna Circuit follows the Kali Gandaki, so anyone who walks it is, without knowing it, treading one of the oldest trade routes in the Himalaya.
At the foot of the Annapurnas, beside Phewa Lake, Pokhara is today Nepal's second city and the country's main tourist hub, but its origins are commercial. For centuries it was a meeting point for the caravan routes coming down from Tibet and Mustang, and a community of traders —Newar and others— settled there to profit from that traffic. Its relative closeness to the border and its mild climate made it the region's natural market.
Pokhara's fortunes changed in the second half of the 20th century. Nepal's opening to the world after the fall of the Ranas, the building of roads linking it to Kathmandu and India, and above all the mountaineering boom turned it into the base camp for trekking in the Annapurna. Above the city rises the unmistakable Machapuchare, the 'fish tail', a peak so revered that it officially remains unclimbed: because of its sacred status, the government bans climbing it.
Today Pokhara lives off adventure tourism: it is the paragliding capital, the starting point of the great routes and a laid-back haven on the lakeshore. Hills such as Sarangkot, above the city, offer the classic sunrises facing the wall of the Annapurna. The region was also the stage for a milestone in world mountaineering: in 1950 the Frenchman Maurice Herzog and his team reached the top of Annapurna I, the first eight-thousander ever climbed, three years before Everest.
The middle hills of the Annapurna region are home to two of the great peoples of the Nepali mountains: the Gurung and the Magar. With a tradition of farming and herding, raising sheep up high and cultivating terraces on the slopes, both combine Buddhism and shamanism with Hindu elements, and both have a strong community culture.
Above all, Gurung and Magar are the heart of Gurkha recruitment. Ever since the British, impressed by their courage in the war of 1814-1816, began enlisting Nepali highlanders, these communities have supplied generations of soldiers to the British and Indian armies. For many families in the region, sending a son to the Gurkhas was for more than a century the main path to getting ahead: a soldier's pay and pension transformed the economy of a whole village. Even today, Gurkha pay and remittances show in the relative prosperity of many villages in these hills.
That military tradition lives alongside the new trekking economy, which employs Gurung and Magar as guides, porters and lodge owners along the Annapurna routes. The soldier and the mountain guide: two ways in which the people of these hills have turned the harshness of their land into a living earned beyond it.
The trekking boom brought prosperity but also problems: deforestation from the demand for firewood, rubbish along the trails and growing pressure on fragile villages and ecosystems. To tackle them, the Annapurna Conservation Area was created in 1986, Nepal's largest protected area, covering more than 7.600 square kilometres that range from subtropical forest to the high-altitude desert of Mustang.
Its model was pioneering: instead of moving people out, as many national parks did, it brought local communities into management and put tourism income —the permit fees paid by thousands of trekkers— into reforestation, energy and education projects in the villages themselves. Within its borders live Gurung, Magar, Thakali and Tibetan-culture communities, alongside some of the most famous mountain routes in the world, such as the Annapurna Circuit and the trek to the Annapurna Sanctuary.
That balance between conservation, living culture and mass tourism is the region's great challenge today. The same beauty that draws crowds every year is what needs protecting, in a land where climate change is already visible in retreating glaciers and in potentially dangerous glacial lakes forming in the high mountains.
A town in the central hills, perched on a ridge facing the Manaslu range, gave its name and origin to modern Nepal: Gorkha. Its kingdom was founded in 1559 by Drabya Shah, a prince from neighbouring Lamjung, and for almost two centuries it was just one more state among the dozens that shared the mountains. Everything changed with the king born there in 1723: Prithvi Narayan Shah, the architect of unification.
Gorkha's history can be read in its Durbar, the palace-fortress that crowns the hill. It is a 16th-century building, attributed to Ram Shah, that blends Newar woodcarving with Mughal-style influences, and it brings together the royal palace and the temples of Kali and of Gorakhnath, the ascetic saint from whom the town — and by extension the Gurkhas — takes its name. From up there you look out over Manaslu, Himalchuli and Ganesh Himal, and also over the hills Prithvi Narayan Shah gazed at while planning the conquest of the Kathmandu Valley.
From Gorkha came the king and the army that forged the country, and from Gorkha comes the word 'Gurkha' by which the world knows Nepalese soldiers. In a bitter twist of history, almost 250 years later, the 2015 earthquake had its epicentre precisely in Gorkha district, in the village of Barpak: the place where unification was born was also the focus of the country's worst recent disaster.
The question that fascinates historians is how a small, poor kingdom like Gorkha managed to subdue dozens of neighbours, including the wealthy cities of the Kathmandu Valley. The answer combines leadership, discipline and geography. Prithvi Narayan Shah turned the Gorkhali highlanders into a tenacious, mobile force able to move across impossible terrain, and he applied a patient strategy of economic blockades rather than frontal assaults.
Gorkha also drew soldiers from several hill peoples — mainly Magar and Gurung, along with Chhetris and others — a mix that gave its army a reputation for toughness. That reputation is what, after the war against the British in 1814-1816, led the British to recruit those same highlanders. And so the name of a hill kingdom ended up designating a military corps famous all over the world.
Unification was not a gentle process: it involved sieges, induced famines and episodes of extreme violence, such as the mutilation of the people of Kirtipur after their surrender. But the result endured. That effort produced a state that, unlike almost all its neighbours, never fell under colonial rule, and whose borders, later trimmed by the British, are essentially those of Nepal today.
Halfway between Kathmandu and Pokhara, on a ridge with views of the Himalaya, Bandipur keeps an atmosphere that has almost disappeared from Nepal: that of a prosperous 19th-century Newar trading town. Although the area was originally Magar, it was Newar merchants from Bhaktapur who, after unification, settled in Bandipur and turned it into an important hub on the trade route between India and Tibet.
For decades, caravans and money passed through its cobbled streets. The Newar merchants built two- and three-storey houses with carved façades, temples and a market square, reproducing on the hilltop the elegant urban layout of the Kathmandu Valley. Bandipur became a leading centre of trade, culture and education in the region.
Its decline came with progress: when, in the 1970s, the Prithvi Highway linking Kathmandu and Pokhara was built through the valley below and left Bandipur isolated on the ridge, trade moved to the new route and the town was frozen in time. That abandonment, paradoxically, saved its heritage: today Bandipur is a pedestrian town, with hardly any cars, restored as a cultural tourism destination, a small living museum of the Newar Nepal of the caravans.
In the far east of Nepal, by the Indian border and very close to Darjeeling, lies Ilam, a region of green, mist-wrapped hills whose history is tied to one crop: tea. The first plantation was established there in 1863, shortly after the British developed the great tea gardens of neighbouring Darjeeling, and ever since, the rolling landscape of tea bushes has defined the area's identity.
These eastern hills are also the heart of Kirat country, particularly of the Limbu (and of the Rai, a little further west), Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples who are among Nepal's oldest inhabitants and who keep their own religion — Kirat Mundhum — and a strong sense of identity. The region, historically known as Limbuwan, retained a degree of autonomy from central power in Kathmandu even after unification, negotiated through pacts with the Shah kings.
Less touristy and more laid-back than the rest of the country, Ilam lives on tea, cardamom and other highland crops, and on emigration: as in so many Nepalese hills, many of its men have served in Gurkha regiments or left to work abroad. It is the green, temperate Nepal of the east, the Nepal of the tea gardens, very different both from the icy peaks of the north and from the hot plains of the south.
The band of middle hills that crosses Nepal from west to east, between the high mountains and the plains, is the country's true demographic heart and one of the densest ethnic mosaics in Asia. In just a few valleys, Magar, Gurung, Tamang, Rai, Limbu, Newar, Chhetris, Bahuns and many other groups live side by side, each with its own language, religion and customs, layered over centuries of migration.
That diversity, an enormous cultural wealth, was also a political challenge. The Gorkha unification imposed from above a language — Nepali — and the Hindu culture of the dominant castes on a plural country, and tensions over the recognition of indigenous peoples (the Janajati) and their languages run through Nepal's modern history, right up to the debate on federalism that shaped the 2015 constitution.
The hills also share an economic fate: they are lands of terraced subsistence farming, of scarce resources, and for that very reason of mass emigration. From recruitment into the Gurkhas to work in the Gulf states, Malaysia or India, whole generations of men from these hills have left to earn a living elsewhere. The remittances they send support a large part of the Nepalese economy and explain why, in so many mountain villages, the young people are missing.
The people who give the Everest region its identity are not originally from Nepal, and their own name says so: 'sherpa' means 'people of the east' in Tibetan (from shar, east, and pa, people). The Sherpa descend from migrants from Kham, in eastern Tibet, who from the 15th and 16th centuries crossed the Himalaya over high passes such as the Nangpa La, at more than 5.700 metres, and settled in the Solu and Khumbu valleys, at the foot of Everest.
At those extreme altitudes —many of their villages sit above 3.500 metres— they built a culture adapted to cold and scarcity: yak herding, growing potatoes and barley, and trading salt and wool with Tibet across the passes. Their religion is Tibetan Buddhism of the Nyingma school, and their life revolves around the monasteries and the mountains, which they consider sacred. They call Everest Chomolungma, 'mother goddess of the world'.
For centuries the Sherpa were a remote community of herders and border traders. The 20th century changed their destiny completely: the first ascent of Everest turned this small mountain people into one of the best known on the planet, and their name into a worldwide byword for strength at altitude.
The highest mountain on Earth had a local name long before it had a name on the world's maps. The Sherpa and the Tibetans call it Chomolungma; in Nepal it is officially known as Sagarmatha, a Sanskrit name coined in the 20th century and usually translated as 'forehead of the sky' or 'head of the sea'. The name the rest of the planet knows it by came from outside.
In 1856 the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, a British project to map the subcontinent, worked out that a Himalayan peak provisionally called 'Peak XV' was the highest point in the world. In 1865 the Royal Geographical Society named it Everest in honour of George Everest, a former head of the survey, even though he himself objected to the tribute. The measurements put it at around 8.848 metres, a figure modern technology has kept refining.
For decades Everest was out of reach: Nepal stayed closed to foreigners under the Ranas, and the first expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s —including that of Mallory and Irvine, who disappeared near the summit in 1924— had to try from the Tibetan side. Only when Nepal opened up to the world, in the early 1950s, did the southern route become available, the one that would finally take a human being to the highest point on the planet.
On 29 May 1953, at 11:30 in the morning, two men stood on the summit of Everest for the first time: the New Zealander Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. They were part of a large British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which had forced a way through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall and set up a chain of camps up to the South Col. The news reached London just in time to be announced on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, on 2 June, and went around the world.
Tenzing Norgay, born near the Everest region, was the most experienced Sherpa of his time: he had made six attempts on the mountain since the 1930s. His standing, alongside Hillary's, made the Sherpa protagonists —not mere porters— of the Himalayan epic. Hillary was knighted by the British Crown; Tenzing received the George Medal. Both always avoided saying which of them had reached the summit first, a gesture of comradeship that became legendary.
Hillary never forgot the people who had made his feat possible. In the decades that followed he devoted much of his life to building schools, hospitals and bridges in the Khumbu through his foundation, leaving a deep mark on the region. The first ascent of Everest also opened the era of commercial mountaineering that would completely transform the economy and the lives of the Sherpa.
Since 1953, climbing Everest has gone from an exceptional feat to an industry. Every season, hundreds of mountaineers from all over the world pay tens of thousands of dollars to attempt the summit, and today a large part of the Khumbu makes its living from them. The Sherpa are the invisible engine of that business: they fix the ropes, set up the camps, carry the gear through the icefall and guide the clients. Many have reached the top dozens of times, records no foreign climber comes close to.
That work comes at a very high price. The Sherpa take on the most dangerous part of every expedition, crossing the deadliest zones of the mountain again and again. In April 2014, an avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall killed sixteen Sherpa workers, the worst tragedy in Everest's history up to then, and sparked protests and a debate over these workers' conditions and insurance. A year later, in 2015, the earthquake triggered an avalanche that swept through base camp and killed around twenty more people.
Mountaineering lifted many Sherpa out of poverty and created a class of respected, relatively prosperous guides, but it also exposed them to a disproportionate risk and to the tensions of an increasingly crowded mountain. The image of long queues of climbers near the summit, in the so-called 'death zone', sums up the contradictions of turning the roof of the world into a commercial destination.
Beyond Everest, the Khumbu region is a Buddhist world of monasteries, prayer flags and stone villages clinging to the mountainside. Tengboche Monastery, at almost 3,900 metres, is the spiritual centre of the Sherpa and one of the most beautiful viewpoints facing Everest; its annual Mani Rimdu festival, with masked dances, brings together the communities of the valley. The whole massif has been protected since 1976 by Sagarmatha National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Somewhat off the classic base camp route lies the Gokyo valley, a quieter alternative that many consider more beautiful: a staircase of intensely turquoise glacial lakes at the foot of the huge Ngozumpa Glacier, the largest in the Nepalese Himalaya, crowned by the Gokyo Ri viewpoint, with views over four eight-thousanders. It is one of the most spectacular high-mountain landscapes in Nepal.
Those same lakes and glaciers are today a thermometer of climate change. Warming is making the Himalayan ice retreat and forming ever larger and more dangerous meltwater lakes, which threaten to burst suddenly onto the valleys below, a phenomenon known as a glacial lake outburst flood. The region that hosted mountaineering's greatest conquest has become, without seeking it, one of the most visible front lines of the global climate crisis.
The Kathmandu Valley is a basin barely twenty kilometres wide, yet it holds the greatest artistic heritage in the Himalaya. The reason lies in its political history: for almost three centuries, after the kingdom was divided on the death of Yaksha Malla in 1482, the valley was split into three independent, rival kingdoms —Kathmandu, Patan (Lalitpur) and Bhaktapur—, each with its own Malla dynasty.
That rivalry between courts was not fought with armies but with architecture. Every king wanted his Durbar square —the royal palace and the temples facing it— to outshine his neighbours'. The result is unique in the world: three small cities, a few kilometres apart, each with a monumental square packed with multi-roofed temples, columns, statues and carved palaces. Patan prides itself on being the oldest and the most closely tied to Buddhism; Bhaktapur, on being the best preserved and most medieval; Kathmandu is the one that ended up as capital of the whole country.
Unity came by force in 1768-1769, when Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha conquered the three cities and ended Newar rule over their own valley. The capital of the new Nepal was set in Kathmandu, and the other two remained sister cities of a single culture. Today seven monument zones in the valley make up a single UNESCO site inscribed in 1979.
The real protagonists of the valley's history are not the kings but the Newar, the basin's original people, heirs to the Kirati and Licchavi, who created one of the most refined craft traditions in Asia. Newar were the architects who perfected the multi-roofed pagoda; Newar were the carvers who covered windows, doors and beams with gods and latticework; Newar were the bronze casters and the painters of paubha, religious paintings on cloth.
Their prestige crossed borders. In the 13th century a young Newar master called Araniko led a mission of artists to Tibet and from there to the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in China, where he left his mark on temples and stupas and helped spread the pagoda style across East Asia. That detail sums up the valley's paradox: a tiny territory that exported art to the greatest empires of its day.
Newari, a Tibeto-Burman language with a rich literature of its own, is still spoken in the valley, and Newar society keeps a complex system of guilds and craft castes. Much of the restoration of the monuments damaged by the 2015 earthquake falls, precisely, to these craftspeople, the only ones who master the techniques their ancestors used to build the cities.
Of the three cities, Bhaktapur is the one that best keeps its medieval soul. Lying in the east of the valley, it was capital of the whole valley in the 14th and 15th centuries, before the division, and later the seat of its own Malla kingdom. Its red-brick streets, its squares and its potters' workshops keep the air of a city frozen in time, with less traffic and more traditional life than Kathmandu.
Its jewel is the Nyatapola, a five-roofed temple more than thirty metres high, the tallest pagoda in Nepal, commissioned in 1702 by King Bhupatindra Malla. Its staircase is lined with pairs of stone guardians —wrestlers, elephants, lions, griffins and goddesses—, each pair ten times stronger than the one below. The Nyatapola stayed standing through the great earthquakes of 1934 and 2015, proof of how sophisticated Newar earthquake-resistant architecture is.
Bhaktapur also keeps its royal palace with the famous Golden Gate and the Palace of 55 Windows, and keeps alive spectacular festivals such as Bisket Jatra, the Newar new year, when a heavy processional chariot is hauled through the streets. In many ways, it is the valley's best time machine.
The Kathmandu Valley is one of the places in the world where Hinduism and Buddhism don't compete but intertwine until they blur together. The same worshippers venerate Hindu gods and Buddhist bodhisattvas; many temples and many festivals belong to both traditions at once. The valley's great shrines show it: the Buddhist stupa of Bodnath, one of the largest in the world and the centre of the Tibetan community; the hill of Swayambhunath, with the Buddha's eyes gazing in all four directions; and the great Hindu temple of Pashupatinath, dedicated to Shiva and a goal for pilgrims and for cremations on the banks of the Bagmati River.
The most astonishing expression of that syncretism is the Kumari, the 'living goddess': a girl, chosen from Buddhist Newar families, worshipped as the incarnation of a Hindu goddess until she reaches puberty. She lives in her own palace on Kathmandu's Durbar Square and only comes out on ceremonial occasions. During the Indra Jatra festival, even the head of state traditionally received her blessing.
It was precisely during the Indra Jatra of 1768 that Prithvi Narayan Shah entered Kathmandu, so the festival links the valley's religious life with the founding moment of modern Nepal. That blend of devotion, art and politics still beats in every square of the valley.
The valley sits on one of the most active seismic faults on the planet, where the Indian plate slides beneath Asia and pushes the Himalaya upwards. Back in 1934 a great earthquake had devastated Kathmandu. On 25 April 2015 it happened again: a magnitude 7,8 quake brought down the Dharahara tower and badly damaged the three Durbar squares. In Kathmandu's square the Kasthamandap collapsed, the wooden pavilion that, according to tradition, gave the city its name. The reconstruction, led by Newar craftspeople, went on for years.
Away from the urban core, on the eastern rim of the valley, the hills show another side of the region. Nagarkot, at about 2.100 metres, is the classic viewpoint over the Himalaya: on clear dawns, especially in autumn and winter, the range stands out from the Annapurnas and Manaslu all the way to, on the clearest days, the distant outline of Everest. For centuries it was a strategic lookout over the valley, and today it is the balcony from which you grasp at a glance the geography that explains all of Nepali history: the fertile, crowded basin below, and the white wall of the highest mountains in the world behind it.
On the Terai plains, near the Indian border, a garden changed the spiritual history of Asia. There, in Lumbini, around the 6th or 5th century BC, Queen Maya Devi gave birth to Siddhartha Gautama, son of the chief of the Shakya clan of Kapilavastu. That child would become the Buddha, and his birthplace is today one of the four great holy sites of Buddhism and a World Heritage Site.
The centre of the complex is the Maya Devi Temple, which shelters a stone slab — the 'marker stone' — said to mark the exact spot of the birth, alongside the foundations of ancient structures and the sacred pool, the Puskarni, where according to tradition the queen bathed before giving birth. Next to it stands the most valuable testimony: the pillar that Emperor Ashoka had erected in 249 BC, whose inscription declares that 'here the Buddha was born', the oldest written evidence identifying the site.
That pillar, forgotten for centuries, was rediscovered in 1896 and made it possible to confirm Lumbini's location. Nearby, at Tilaurakot, lies ancient Kapilavastu, the city where Prince Siddhartha spent his youth before giving up everything to seek enlightenment. The whole south of this region is, in a sense, the landscape of the Buddha's childhood.
After Buddhism vanished from northern India in the Middle Ages, Lumbini lay abandoned for almost a thousand years, swallowed by the Terai jungle and lost to the world. Its rediscovery in 1896, when the Ashoka pillar was found by an expedition led by General Khadga Shumsher Rana and the archaeologist Alois Anton Führer, brought the site back into memory and pilgrimage.
The big push came in the 20th century. The 1967 visit of UN Secretary-General U Thant, a Burmese Buddhist, rallied international support to restore the site. In 1978, the renowned Japanese architect Kenzo Tange drew up an ambitious master plan for Lumbini: a large sacred precinct organised around a canal, with the archaeological zone to the south and a 'monastic zone' to the north where Buddhist countries from all over the world would build their own temples.
That plan, still under way, has made Lumbini a unique place: a peace garden where monasteries from Thailand, Myanmar, China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Germany and many other countries stand side by side, each in its own style, around the birth site. It is at once an archaeological site, a global pilgrimage centre and a symbol of Buddhism as a world religion, in the Nepal that is proud to be its cradle.
The Terai is the strip of tropical lowland that Nepal shares with the great Ganges plain: fertile, flat land, hot and humid, which today produces most of the country's food and is home to a huge share of its population. Nothing could be further from the mountainous image of Nepal, and yet it is an essential part of its history.
For centuries, much of the Terai was an almost impenetrable jungle, ruled by malaria, which acted as a natural barrier: few outsiders dared to cross it, which protected the hill kingdoms from invasions from the south. In that jungle lived, adapted to it, the Tharu people, the indigenous population of the Terai, with a remarkable natural resistance to malaria and a culture of their own, of mud villages and rice.
Everything changed in the mid-20th century. Malaria eradication campaigns with DDT in the 1950s and 1960s opened the jungle to settlement: hundreds of thousands of people from the hills came down to clear and farm the Terai, which became Nepal's breadbasket at the cost of massive deforestation. That mix of Tharus, hill settlers and people of Indian origin along the border — the Madhesi — made the Terai the most diverse region in the country and also one of the most tense, the scene of strong political demands, such as the Madhesi protests against the 2015 constitution.
The inner valley of Chitwan, in the central Terai, was for generations the great hunting ground of Nepal's royalty and aristocracy. Protected by malaria and reserved for the pleasure of the Ranas and the kings, its jungle was home to extraordinary wildlife. Lavish hunts were held there: during visits by foreign dignitaries — such as that of King George V of Great Britain in 1911 — dozens of tigers and rhinos were shot in just a few days, from the backs of elephants.
The opening of the Terai to settlement from the 1950s onwards put that wildlife at risk. Logging and poaching drastically reduced the populations of greater one-horned rhinoceros and Bengal tiger, which came close to disappearing. In response to the alarm, in 1973 the government created Chitwan National Park, Nepal's first, even evicting Tharu communities from inside it to protect the wildlife, a decision that is still debated.
The effort paid off: Chitwan became one of Asia's great conservation successes and in 1984 was declared a World Heritage Site. Today it protects one of the largest populations of one-horned rhinoceros in the world, as well as tigers, elephants, gharials and bears, and it is Nepal's classic safari destination. The same jungle that was once a hunting ground for kings is now a sanctuary where those animals, once trophies, are its greatest treasure.
The Terai is home today to more than half of Nepal's population and a large part of its agricultural and industrial output, but for a long time it felt treated as a periphery by a power centred in the hills and the Kathmandu Valley. The Madhesi — the people of the plains, many of them with languages and cultures related to those of northern India — have for decades been demanding greater political representation, recognition of their languages and a fairer share of power.
That tension erupted forcefully during the drafting of the 2015 constitution. Madhesi parties and other groups felt that the new map of seven provinces and the rules on citizenship and representation worked against them, and they led protests and a blockade of the Indian border that for months left Nepal without fuel or medicine. The episode showed just how much the full integration of the Terai remains one of the great open questions of the republic.
The history of this region sums up, at heart, that of the whole country: a Nepal that runs from the icy peaks of the Himalaya to the tropical plains, from the Buddha's birthplace to rhino sanctuaries, and that, after centuries of kingdoms, unifications and wars, is still looking for a way for all its peoples — of the mountains and of the plains — to feel part of the same state.
Hardly anything that happened to Nepal happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
