A short history of Nepal

Nepal's recorded history opens with the Kirat dynasty, a line of rulers from the eastern hills who, by tradition, governed the Kathmandu Valley for centuries. The Kirat are remembered in the Mundhum oral tradition and are ancestral to today's Rai and Limbu peoples. The Buddha was born at Lumbini in the Terai during this long period, around the 6th–5th century BCE.

The Licchavis brought the valley its first well-documented state, leaving stone inscriptions, sophisticated water systems and the earliest temples. Trade and pilgrimage linked the valley to India and Tibet. King Amshuvarman married his daughter Bhrikuti to the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo, and she is credited in Tibetan tradition with helping carry Buddhism north.

Under the Malla kings the Kathmandu Valley reached its artistic peak. After the 15th century it split into three rival city-states — Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur — whose competition produced the spectacular Durbar Squares, pagoda temples and Newari craft traditions seen today. This golden age of art ended only with the Gorkha conquest.

Prithvi Narayan Shah, the king of the small hill state of Gorkha, conquered the Kathmandu Valley in 1768–69 and welded dozens of principalities into a single kingdom — the origin of modern Nepal. He famously called the new country 'a yam between two boulders,' India and China. His campaigns set the borders that, after later wars with Tibet and British India, became roughly today's.

After the bloody Kot Massacre of 1846, Jung Bahadur Rana seized power and made the office of prime minister hereditary, reducing the Shah kings to figureheads for a century. The Ranas kept Nepal isolated and largely closed to outsiders while building lavish neoclassical palaces in Kathmandu. Their rule ended in the 1951 revolution that restored the monarchy and cracked the country open.

A brief democratic experiment in the 1950s gave way in 1960 to King Mahendra's party-less Panchayat system, which concentrated power in the palace for three decades. Nepal slowly opened to tourism and aid during these years. A popular movement in 1990 (the Jana Andolan) forced King Birendra to accept a constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy.

Multiparty democracy was shaken by a decade-long Maoist insurgency that began in 1996 and cost some 17,000 lives. In 2001 the royal family was killed in a palace massacre, and the unpopular King Gyanendra later seized direct power. Mass protests in 2006 (the second Jana Andolan) restored parliament and led to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the war.

Nepal's monarchy was abolished and a republic declared on 28 May 2008. After years of debate, a new constitution promulgated in 2015 — the same year a devastating earthquake struck — restructured the country into seven federal provinces. Nepal today is a federal democratic republic still working through the practicalities of that federal settlement.