The history of Nepal

Nepal stretches along the central Himalaya, from the hot plains of the Terai to the highest mountains on earth. For most of its history "Nepal" meant only the Kathmandu Valley, where Licchavi and then Malla kings built a brilliant urban civilisation of temples, palaces and Newar craftsmanship, fed by trade between India and Tibet. In the eighteenth century the hill kingdom of Gorkha conquered the valley and dozens of small principalities, creating the modern state, which escaped colonial rule but lived for a century under the hereditary Rana prime ministers. Since 1951 Nepal has swung between monarchy and democracy, endured a Maoist civil war, abolished its crown in 2008, and in 2025 saw a youth uprising overturn its government.

Stone tools from the Siwalik hills of Dang district show that people lived in what is now Nepal in the Palaeolithic, and Neolithic sites have been found in the same foothills. The country's later population came from two directions. Speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages, ancestors of peoples such as the Magar, Gurung, Tamang, Rai and Limbu, settled the hills and high valleys, while Indo-Aryan speakers moved into the lowlands and later up the river valleys. Nepali chronicles name a succession of early dynasties, the cowherd Gopalas and the buffalo-herding Mahishapalas, and then the Kirata, whose kings are said to have ruled the Kathmandu Valley for many generations. The Kirati peoples of eastern Nepal still trace their identity to them, though the early chronicles were written down only in the fourteenth century and mix memory with legend.

The Terai was part of the world of the Gangetic plain. Around the sixth or fifth century BCE it was home to the Shakyas, an oligarchic clan republic, and at Lumbini a Shakya prince, Siddhartha Gautama, was born. As the Buddha he founded one of the world's great religions, Buddhism. Two centuries later the Mauryan emperor Ashoka visited Lumbini and set up an inscribed pillar marking the birthplace, which was rediscovered in 1896. In the fourth century CE an inscription of the Gupta Empire listed Nepal among the frontier kingdoms that paid tribute to Samudragupta, the first secure outside reference to the valley as a state.

By around 400 CE a dynasty called the Licchavis, who claimed descent from a famous clan of north Indian Vaishali, ruled the Kathmandu Valley. Their rule, which lasted until about 879, is the first period of Nepali history that can be reconstructed from documents: some two hundred stone inscriptions in Sanskrit, the oldest dated one set up by King Manadeva in 464. The inscriptions record land grants, village councils, irrigation channels and the endowment of Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries, which flourished side by side.

The valley's wealth came from its position on the shortest route between the Gangetic plain and Tibet. The most celebrated Licchavi-era ruler, Amshuverma, was a powerful minister who took royal power in the early seventh century and built a palace that impressed Chinese visitors. Tibetan tradition holds that a Nepali princess, Bhrikuti, married the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo and helped bring Buddhism to Tibet, and during the Tibetan Empire the valley was for a time drawn into Tibet's orbit. Craftsmen from Nepal worked across the Himalaya for centuries afterwards.

The end of the Licchavi line is obscure. A new era, Nepal Sambat, begins in October 879 and is still used by the Newar people. The kings of the next three centuries, usually called the Thakuris, are poorly documented, but under them the valley's towns grew. Tradition credits King Gunakama Deva with founding Kantipur, the core of later Kathmandu, and with building the Kasthamandap, a great wooden rest house that gave the city its name.

From about 1200 kings bearing the title Malla ruled the valley. Its artists became famous across Asia: in 1260 the young Newar craftsman Araniko went to Tibet and then to the court of Kublai Khan, where he designed the White Stupa in Beijing and helped spread the Himalayan style of the pagoda. Far to the west, a separate Khasa Malla kingdom based in the Karnali basin ruled much of western Nepal and western Tibet in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, before breaking up into many small principalities. In 1349 an army of the Bengal sultan Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah raided the Kathmandu Valley, burning temples and damaging the great stupa of Swayambhunath.

The valley recovered under Jayasthiti Malla, who took power in 1382. He is remembered for reorganising society along a caste hierarchy based on Hindu law codes, a system that shaped Newar society for centuries. His grandson Yaksha Malla ruled a united valley until 1482, but after his death his heirs divided it, and by the sixteenth century three rival kingdoms had their capitals at Kathmandu, Patan (Lalitpur) and Bhaktapur, each only a few kilometres from the others.

The three kingdoms fought constantly, yet they produced the valley's finest architecture. Each capital competed to build a richer palace square, and most of the temples, courtyards and water spouts that make up today's World Heritage site date from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Pratap Malla of Kathmandu, Siddhi Narasimha Malla of Patan and Bhupatindra Malla of Bhaktapur were great builders and patrons of drama and music. The kingdoms grew rich on the Tibet trade, and Nepali mints struck the silver coins that circulated in Tibet. Outside the valley, the hills were divided among dozens of small states, the so-called twenty-two and twenty-four kingdoms, ruled by families of Khas and Rajput descent.

One of the hill states, Gorkha, west of the valley, had been founded by Drabya Shah in 1559. In 1743 Prithvi Narayan Shah became its king and set out to conquer the Malla kingdoms. He took the fortress of Nuwakot in 1744, then gradually blockaded the valley, cutting its trade routes. Kirtipur fell in 1767 after two failed attacks, and the same year his forces defeated a small East India Company expedition sent to help the Malla kings. On 25 September 1768, while the people of Kathmandu were celebrating the festival of Indra Jatra, Gorkhali troops entered the city. Patan fell soon afterwards and Bhaktapur in 1769. Prithvi Narayan Shah moved his capital to Kathmandu and is regarded as the founder of modern Nepal, which he described as a garden of many castes and peoples, and as a yam between two boulders, China and British India.

His successors kept expanding. By the 1790s Gorkhali armies had conquered the hills of the east to Sikkim and in the west took Kumaon and Garhwal, reaching the Sutlej by the early nineteenth century. An invasion of Tibet in 1788 and the plunder of the Tashilhunpo monastery in 1791 provoked the Qing dynasty, whose army marched almost to Kathmandu in 1792 and forced Nepal to accept a tributary relationship with Beijing.

Nepal's expansion along the Terai brought it into conflict with the East India Company. The Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814 to 1816 began with Nepali successes in the hills, where the Company's armies were badly beaten, but the larger and better armed British forces eventually prevailed. The Treaty of Sugauli, ratified in 1816, took Sikkim, Kumaon, Garhwal and much of the Terai, fixing Nepal's borders roughly where they are today, and placed a British Resident in Kathmandu. The British were so impressed by their opponents that they began recruiting Nepali hillmen as soldiers, the origin of the Gurkha regiments that later served in both world wars.

At court, the young Shah kings were overshadowed by rival noble families. The powerful minister Bhimsen Thapa dominated government from 1806 until his fall in 1837, and in the following years factions of the Thapa, Pande and other families fought for control.

On the night of 14 September 1846 a quarrel at the palace armoury, the Kot, turned into a massacre in which dozens of leading nobles were killed. The victor, Jung Bahadur Kunwar, later known as Jung Bahadur Rana, made himself prime minister and secured a royal decree making the office hereditary in his family. From then until 1951 the Shah kings were kept as revered figureheads while the Rana prime ministers ruled. Jung Bahadur visited Britain and France in 1850, the first South Asian ruler to do so, and in 1854 issued the Muluki Ain, a legal code that ranked every community in a single caste hierarchy. He sent troops to help the British suppress the Indian rebellion of 1857, and was rewarded with the return of part of the western Terai in 1860.

The Ranas kept Nepal closed to outsiders and kept most Nepalis illiterate, but they also kept it independent of the British Raj. In 1923 Britain signed a treaty recognising Nepal's full sovereignty, and in 1924 Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher abolished slavery. Nepal declared war on Germany in 1939, and its battalions and Gurkha recruits fought in Burma and elsewhere in the Second World War.

After Indian independence, opponents of the Ranas, many educated in India, organised the Nepali Congress party. In November 1950 King Tribhuvan took refuge in the Indian embassy and flew to Delhi, while the Congress launched an armed rising. Under an agreement brokered by India, Rana rule ended in February 1951 and the king returned with real power. A treaty of 1950 had already bound Nepal closely to India, which became its dominant economic partner. Nepal opened to the world: it joined the United Nations in 1955, and Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary made the first ascent of Everest from the Nepali side in 1953.

The first general election was held in 1959, and B. P. Koirala of the Nepali Congress became prime minister. In December 1960 King Mahendra dismissed and imprisoned him, banned political parties and, under the constitution of 1962, created the Panchayat system, a pyramid of indirectly elected councils that left power with the crown. Mahendra and his son Birendra, king from 1972, promoted a single national identity built on the Nepali language, Hindu monarchy and loyalty to the throne. A referendum in 1980 narrowly kept the Panchayat system, but in 1990 the Jana Andolan, or People's Movement, led by the Nepali Congress and a front of communist parties, filled the streets of Kathmandu. Birendra gave way, and a new constitution made him a constitutional monarch in a multiparty democracy.

The democratic governments of the 1990s were unstable and did little for the rural poor, especially in the western hills. On 13 February 1996 the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known as Prachanda, and Baburam Bhattarai, launched a People's War. The insurgency spread across much of the countryside, where the Maoists set up their own courts and administration. Over ten years more than 17,000 people were killed, the majority by government forces, and both sides were accused of torture and disappearances.

On 1 June 2001 Crown Prince Dipendra shot dead his father King Birendra, his mother and seven other members of the royal family at a palace dinner before shooting himself, according to the official inquiry. Birendra's brother Gyanendra became king. In 2002 he dismissed the elected government, and on 1 February 2005 he took direct power. The parliamentary parties then made common cause with the Maoists, and in April 2006 a second People's Movement forced the king to restore parliament. A Comprehensive Peace Accord on 21 November 2006 ended the war. In the 2008 election to a Constituent Assembly the Maoists became the largest party, and on 28 May 2008 the assembly abolished the 240-year-old Shah monarchy and declared Nepal a federal democratic republic. Prachanda became prime minister.

Writing a constitution took seven years. On 25 April 2015 a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck central Nepal, killing nearly 9,000 people and destroying many of the valley's historic temples, including much of Kathmandu's Durbar Square and the Dharahara tower. The disaster pushed the parties to agree, and on 20 September 2015 a new constitution created a secular federal republic of seven provinces. Madhesi parties of the Terai protested that the new boundaries left them under-represented, and months of protests and a blockade of the border with India caused severe fuel shortages. Since then governments have rotated rapidly among the same leaders, among them K. P. Sharma Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), Sher Bahadur Deuba of the Nepali Congress and Prachanda.

In early September 2025 the government blocked 26 social media platforms. Protests led by young Nepalis against the ban, corruption and the privilege of political families began on 8 September and turned violent after police opened fire. Official figures put the deaths at 76. Oli resigned on 9 September, and on 12 September the former chief justice Sushila Karki became interim prime minister, the first woman to hold the office. Parliament was dissolved, and in the election of 5 March 2026 the Rastriya Swatantra Party won 182 of the 275 seats. Its leader, Balen Shah, a former mayor of Kathmandu, became prime minister on 27 March 2026.