Nepalनेपाल

The Kathmandu valley was once a lake; legend says the bodhisattva Manjushri cut a gorge to drain it, and geologists agree the basin was flooded. Its first recorded rulers, the Licchavis, governed from about the fourth to the ninth century and left inscriptions, stone sculptures and the core of shrines such as Changu Narayan. Far to the south, in the Terai, the Buddha had been born at Lumbini around the sixth century BC, a site marked by a pillar the Indian emperor Ashoka raised in 249 BC.

From the twelfth century the Malla kings ruled the valley and, after 1482, split it into three rival city-states: Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur. Competition between them produced the palace squares, pagoda temples and bathing tanks that visitors walk through today. Newar artisans from these cities were famous across the Himalaya; one of them, Araniko, worked at the court of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century.

In 1768–69 Prithvi Narayan Shah, king of the hill state of Gorkha, conquered the valley and made Kathmandu the capital of an expanding kingdom. Expansion stopped in the war with the British East India Company of 1814–16; the Treaty of Sugauli fixed most of the modern borders and began the recruitment of Gurkha soldiers into British service. From 1846 the Rana family of hereditary prime ministers held real power, kept the kings as figureheads and closed the country to foreigners.

A revolt in 1950–51 restored royal power and opened Nepal. Hillary and Tenzing's Everest ascent in 1953 put the country on the map, and the hippie trail of the 1960s and 70s made Kathmandu's Freak Street a destination. Party politics were banned under the panchayat system from 1960 until a people's movement in 1990 restored multiparty democracy. A Maoist insurgency from 1996 to 2006 killed about 17,000 people; in 2001 the crown prince shot most of the royal family, and in 2008 an elected assembly abolished the monarchy.

The republic has struggled with unstable coalitions, a long wait for a constitution (adopted in 2015, months after an earthquake killed about 9,000 people) and a blockade on the Indian border that same year. In September 2025 young protesters, angered by a ban on social media platforms and by corruption, stormed parliament; more than 70 people died, the government fell, and an interim prime minister organised elections for March 2026. Check the latest political situation before you travel.

The census counts more than 120 ethnic and caste groups and a similar number of languages. Broadly, the hills are home to Nepali-speaking Brahmin and Chhetri castes, whose language became the national one, alongside Tibeto-Burman peoples such as the Magar, Gurung, Tamang, Rai and Limbu. The high valleys belong to Tibetan-speaking communities, including the Sherpa of the Everest region, while the Terai plains are home to Maithili, Bhojpuri and Tharu speakers culturally close to northern India.

The Newar of the Kathmandu valley are a case of their own: an urban people with their own language, Nepal Bhasa, their own calendar and a caste system that includes both Hindu and Buddhist priests. They built the valley's cities and still run many of its festivals, from the chariot processions of Patan to the masked dances of Bhaktapur. Much of what visitors call Nepali architecture and food is, in fact, Newar.

Caste was written into law by the 1854 legal code and abolished as a basis of discrimination in 1963, but it still shapes marriage, surnames and village life. Dalit communities face discrimination, and the ethnic Janajati and Madhesi groups have long campaigned for more representation; the 2015 constitution's federal map of seven provinces grew out of those demands and still causes arguments.

Almost every family has someone working abroad. Several million Nepalis work in the Gulf states, Malaysia, India and increasingly Japan, South Korea and Europe, and their remittances support villages across the hills. The effect is visible on treks: villages with few young men, new concrete houses funded from Qatar, and schools teaching English in the hope of the next job overseas.

About four in five Nepalis are Hindu and about one in ten Buddhist, but the line between them is blurred. The same shrine may be honoured as a form of Shiva by one family and as a bodhisattva by another. Swayambhunath, on its hill above Kathmandu, draws both, and Hindu gods stand beside Buddhas in many Newar courtyards. Nepal was the world's only officially Hindu kingdom until 2008; it is now a secular republic, though cow slaughter and conversion remain illegal.

Pashupatinath, on the Bagmati river, is the country's holiest Hindu temple, dedicated to Shiva as lord of the animals. Its ghats are cremation grounds, and its courtyard is open only to Hindus; visitors watch from the far bank. At the Shivaratri festival each spring tens of thousands of pilgrims and ash-smeared sadhus arrive, many from India.

Tibetan Buddhism shapes the north and much of the Kathmandu valley's Buddhist life. Boudhanath, one of the largest stupas in the world, became the centre of a Tibetan refugee community after 1959, surrounded by monasteries that welcome visitors. Prayer flags, mani stones carved with mantras and prayer wheels line the trekking trails, always passed clockwise.

The Kumari, a young girl chosen from a Newar Buddhist caste and worshipped as the living form of the Hindu goddess Taleju, lives in a palace on Kathmandu Durbar Square until puberty. She appears at a window for visitors and is carried through the streets during Indra Jatra. The custom, criticised by child-rights groups, sums up the valley's faith: Hindu and Buddhist at once, and centred on living ritual rather than on a single book.

The valley's three royal cities follow a pattern: a palace square at the centre, surrounded by temples, bathing tanks and residential courtyards called bahal or bahil, many of them former Buddhist monasteries. Houses are built of fine red brick with carved wooden windows, the peacock window of Bhaktapur being the most photographed. Streets are laid out so that processions can circle the city.

The multi-roofed pagoda temple is the Newar contribution to Asian architecture. Tiers of tiled roofs rest on carved wooden struts depicting deities, and sometimes erotic scenes, above a stepped plinth. Nyatapola in Bhaktapur, five storeys high and guarded by pairs of wrestlers, elephants, lions and griffins on its stairs, has stood since 1702 and survived both the 1934 and 2015 earthquakes.

Patan specialises in metal. Its craftsmen cast bronze and copper deities by the lost-wax method for monasteries across the Himalaya, and the Golden Temple (Hiranya Varna Mahavihar) shows their work in gilded copper. Kathmandu's Durbar Square mixes Malla temples with the white neoclassical wing the Ranas added in the twentieth century.

The 2015 earthquake brought down dozens of monuments, including parts of Kathmandu's Durbar Square and the Kasthamandap, the wooden rest house that gave the city its name. Reconstruction, some of it controversial for using concrete, went on for years; most major temples have now reopened. Look for dated plaques naming donor countries and for scaffolding that still marks work in progress.

The Himalaya are still rising as the Indian plate pushes into Asia, which is why Nepal has both the highest peaks and frequent earthquakes. Eight of the fourteen mountains over 8,000 m stand wholly or partly in Nepal, among them Everest (Sagarmatha in Nepali, Chomolungma in Tibetan), Kanchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu and Annapurna. Deep river gorges cut between them, and the Kali Gandaki valley is often described as the deepest on Earth.

Nepal opened its mountains to foreign expeditions after 1949. Annapurna, climbed by a French team in 1950, was the first 8,000 m peak summited; Everest followed in 1953. Sherpas, whose ancestors migrated from eastern Tibet several centuries ago, became the backbone of high-altitude climbing, and Sherpa climbers now hold most records, including more than twenty Everest ascents by single individuals.

Trekking grew from the 1960s into the mainstay of mountain economies. Teahouses, family lodges that sell food and beds, line the Everest, Annapurna and Langtang trails and changed village life: income for families, but also rubbish, road-building and the loss of young people to guiding. Rules have tightened: licensed guides for foreigners from 2023, stricter summit permits, and pilot schemes requiring climbers to carry down their waste.

Climate change is visible. Glaciers are retreating, glacial lakes have grown behind unstable moraines, and floods such as the one that hit Thame in the Khumbu in August 2024 show the risk. Spring expeditions on Everest now face crowding on summit days, and the government raised the permit fee to US$15,000 for the spring season from September 2025, with further rules on experience under discussion — check.

Nepal is one of Asia's poorer countries but has cut extreme poverty sharply since the 1990s, largely thanks to remittances, which have run at about a quarter of GDP. Tourism brings foreign currency and jobs, hydropower is expanding with exports of electricity to India and Bangladesh, and new international airports opened at Bhairahawa (2022) and Pokhara (2023), though both have struggled to attract airlines.

Geography makes politics about neighbours. India, which surrounds Nepal on three sides, supplies most of its fuel and goods and shares an open border; the 2015 blockade still colours feelings. China has built roads, the Pokhara airport and trade links across the Himalaya. Governments in Kathmandu balance between the two, and every visit by a prime minister to Delhi or Beijing is read for signs of a tilt.

A generation born after the civil war has grown impatient with the old parties. The September 2025 protests, organised on Discord and TikTok by people in their teens and twenties, brought down a government within days and led to elections in March 2026 in which new faces competed with the established parties. Check the latest before travelling; strikes and demonstrations can still close roads at short notice.

For visitors, the changes show up as better roads to trailheads, digital payment apps such as eSewa and Khalti, and a growing café culture in Kathmandu and Pokhara. They also show up as traffic, air pollution in the dry season and concrete replacing brick. The valley's old cities remain lived-in places, where morning puja and evening chariots continue beside the phone shops.