Journey
Kathmandu Valley — the Newar sacred city
Three royal cities within ten kilometres of each other, each with its own palace square, in a valley where Shaiva, Vaishnava and Buddhist Newar practice share one ritual calendar and, in several cases, one shrine. The craft that built all of it is still working in the same lanes of Patan.
Stops (11)
- Changu Narayan · 464 CE
Changu Narayan on its hilltop, with the earliest dated inscription in Nepal — a Licchavi record of 464 — and a Garuda figure of about the same period. The struts, the repoussé doors and the stone sculpture around the courtyard cover thirteen hundred years of continuous work on one site.
- Pashupatinath · the valley's Shiva
Pashupatinath on the Bagmati, the great Shiva temple of Nepal, with cremation ghats that do for the valley what Manikarnika does for Kashi. Its chief priests are by long convention Karnataka Brahmins, an arrangement Nepal has maintained through every change of dynasty since the Mallas. Nepal has maintained the Karnataka Brahmin priesthood through every change of dynasty since the Mallas.
- Swayambhūnāth · the self-arisen
Swayambhunath on its hill, whose origin story has Manjushri draining the primordial lake to create the valley — a Buddhist landscape-creation narrative that works exactly like the Hindu ones elsewhere in this repository. Newar Buddhists and Tibetan pilgrims both circumambulate it. Newar Buddhists and Tibetan pilgrims both circumambulate it, and the Newar rite performed there is Vajrayana practised by householders rather than by monks, which exists nowhere else.
- Boudhanāth · the Tibet road
Boudhanath, the great stupa on the old Kathmandu to Lhasa trade road, and the Tibetan and Newar pilgrimage hub of the valley. The Tibetan refugee settlement around it after 1959 made it the centre of exile Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal as well as a trade-route shrine. The Tibetan settlement around it after 1959 made it the centre of exile Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal.
- Kathmandu Durbar Square · from 1768
Kathmandu's own square, with the Hanuman Dhoka palace, the Taleju temple, the Kasthamandap that gives the city its name, and the house of the Kumari, the living girl-goddess. Prithvi Narayan Shah took it in 1768 and made it the capital of a unified Nepal. The Kasthamandap collapsed in 2015 and excavation during its rebuilding found levels from the seventh century.
- Bhaktapur Durbar Square · Malla capital to 1769
Bhaktapur's square, the most complete of the three: the fifty-five-window palace, the golden gate, the Nyatapola's five tiers on a stepped plinth. It was the least altered of the Malla cities and the worst damaged in 2015, and the rebuilding has been done largely by Newar craftsmen to Newar method.
- Patan Durbar Square · Malla capital to 1768
Patan's square, the densest of the three, with the Krishna Mandir cut entirely in stone rather than brick and timber, and courtyards of metalworkers' houses behind it. The city has been the valley's workshop for a thousand years and still is. The Krishna Mandir is cut entirely in stone rather than brick and timber, which is unique in the valley, and the courtyards behind it are metalworkers' houses that are still workshops.
- Newar lost-wax and repoussé metalwork, Patan · a thousand years
The Sakya and Vajracharya workshops of Patan, casting gilt-copper images by lost wax and beating torana and roof ornament by repoussé for Himalayan Buddhism. Tibetan monasteries commissioned from them for centuries, and the Newar style is the standard against which Himalayan bronzes are described. Aniko, a Newar artist from these lanes, became head of imperial artisans at the Yuan court in Beijing.
- Kirtipur · fell 1767
Kirtipur on its ridge south-west of Kathmandu, walled, with the Bagh Bhairab temple at its centre, which held out against Prithvi Narayan Shah through three sieges before falling. The chronicles record that the noses and lips of much of the male population were then cut off on his order and the town renamed Naskatipur. It is the founding atrocity of the Nepali state.
- Panauti · 13th century
Panauti at the confluence of the Punyamati and Roshi, holding the Indreshwar Mahadev — a three-tiered pagoda whose lowest storey and carved struts are thirteenth-century, generally reckoned the oldest surviving temple structure in Nepal. The town sits on a single rock outcrop, which is why it came through the 1934 and 2015 earthquakes far better than Bhaktapur did.
- Namobuddha · the tigress
Namobuddha, a hilltop stupa south-east of the valley marking where tradition holds the Buddha, in an earlier birth, gave his body to a starving tigress — one of the three great Buddhist sites of Nepal with Swayambhu and Boudha. The same jataka is localised at Taxila and at Mankiala in the Punjab, so three countries each hold the place it happened.