Place · fortified hill town · Nepal
Gorkha
The hill centre at Gorkha in Nepal, 140 kilometres west of Kathmandu — the ancestral seat of the Shah dynasty (founded by Dravya Shah in 1559) that produced Prithvi Narayan Shah (ruled 1743-1775), the king who conquered and unified the Kathmandu Valley kingdoms of Kantipur, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur between 1744 and 1769 to create modern Nepal. The Gorkha Durbar palace (1600s), the Kalika Mandir, and the Gorakhnath temple on the hill preserve the Shah-era heritage. The 1814-1816 Anglo-Nepalese War made 'Gurkha' the British term for the Nepali soldiers recruited from Gorkha and surrounding hill regions — a tradition continued in the British and Indian Gurkha regiments. The 2015 Nepal earthquake had its epicentre 34 kilometres from Gorkha and destroyed much of the medieval hill town; reconstruction is ongoing.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Tradition
- Nepalese political history
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.000, 84.633
Connections (4)
- AnalogueGimhae
The Gimhae tomb tradition and the Himalayan dynastic genealogies work the same way: a thirteenth-century Korean text derives a royal line from a foreign princess out of a country called Ayuta, as Nepali and Southeast Asian chronicles derive their houses from Indian kshatriya ancestors. The repository records the claim and where it is made, not the voyage.
- Power passed toKathmandu Durbar Square
Prithvi Narayan Shah took Kathmandu in September 1768 and Bhaktapur the following year, and moved his capital from Gorkha into the valley. The Newar cities kept their craft, their ritual calendar and their languages and lost their sovereignty, and the Kumari of Kathmandu began receiving the blessing of a Shah king instead of a Malla one — which she still does, from a president.
- Power passed toLo Manthang
Lo Manthang's kingdom of Lo was founded in 1380 and stayed separate until 1795, when Gorkha absorbed it; its raja kept a recognised title until Nepal abolished it in 2008, which makes it among the very last royal houses in South Asia to lose its status. The Gorkhali state that took the valley cities also took a walled Tibetan capital on the far side of the Himalaya.
- CampaignKirtipur
Kirtipur held out against Prithvi Narayan Shah through three sieges before falling in 1767, and 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 and it is recorded in Nepal's own sources, not a foreign one.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Gorkha Municipality”. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean; the Cairo Geniza India Book (Goitein and Friedman).
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