Who ruled Kathmandu?

Kathmandu lies in a bowl-shaped valley in the hills of central Nepal, about 1,400 metres above sea level, with the high Himalaya to the north. The valley floor was once a lake, and its fertile lake-bed soils supported dense farming and towns at a time when most of the surrounding hills were thinly settled. It also sat on a trade route between the plains of India and Tibet. Two things define its history: the brilliant urban culture of the Newar people, who filled the valley with temples, palaces and Buddhist monasteries, and its role since 1768 as the capital of a unified Nepal.

A local legend says the bodhisattva Manjushri drained the lake with a stroke of his sword and made the valley habitable. Early chronicles list Kirata kings, but the first firm evidence comes from the Licchavis, a dynasty with roots in northern India, whose Sanskrit inscriptions begin in the 400s CE. They ruled the valley until about 750 and built shrines such as Changu Narayan, mixing Hinduism and Buddhism in a way that still marks Nepal. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang described the kingdom in the 7th century, and envoys of the Tang court travelled through it towards India, often via Tibet, whose kings for a time had influence over the valley's rulers.

The city of Kathmandu itself took shape from older villages, traditionally around the 10th century. Its name comes from the Kasthamandap, a large wooden rest-house in the central square said to have been built from a single tree. From about 1200 the valley was ruled by the Malla dynasty. In the 1400s the kingdom was divided among heirs, and three rival city-states emerged: Kathmandu (Kantipur), Patan (Lalitpur) and Bhaktapur. Competition between their kings produced the Durbar Squares, the palace and temple complexes that are the valley's greatest monuments. Newar craftsmen worked in wood, bronze and brick, and their skills were sought in Tibet and China.

In the 18th century the small hill kingdom of Gorkha, to the west, began conquering its neighbours under Prithvi Narayan Shah. His forces blockaded the valley for years and took Kathmandu in 1768, during the Indra Jatra festival, then Patan and Bhaktapur. He made Kathmandu the capital of the new kingdom of Nepal. Expansion led to war with Qing China in 1792 and with the British East India Company from 1814 to 1816, which ended in the loss of large territories and a British resident in the capital.

In 1846 Jung Bahadur Kunwar seized power after the Kot massacre, a night of killings in a palace courtyard, and his family, the Ranas, ruled as hereditary prime ministers for a century while the Shah kings were figureheads. They built vast European-style palaces and kept Nepal largely closed to outsiders. A great earthquake in 1934 destroyed much of the city. The Rana regime fell in 1951, and Kathmandu opened up, becoming a destination for mountaineers and, in the 1960s and 1970s, travellers on the overland trail.

The city was the main stage of Nepal's political upheavals: mass protests in 1990 that restored multiparty democracy, the killing of King Birendra and much of the royal family in the palace in 2001, the 2006 movement that ended a decade of Maoist insurgency, and the abolition of the monarchy in 2008. On 25 April 2015 another severe earthquake damaged many temples, including the Kasthamandap, which was later rebuilt. In September 2025 youth-led protests in the capital forced the prime minister to resign.

The metropolitan city has close to a million people and the whole valley around three million. It is Nepal's capital and largest urban area, and seven groups of monuments in the valley form a UNESCO World Heritage Site.