Place · Newar royal city & Nepal's capital · Nepal
Kathmandu
/ˈkaʈʰmaɳɖu/
Also known as Kāṭhmāḍauṁ, Kantipur, Yẽ, Yambu, Koligram
Kathmandu is Nepal's capital and the largest city of the Kathmandu Valley, known until the medieval period as Kantipur and also called Kasthamandap. The Licchavi king Gunakamadeva is credited with merging two settlements into one city, and in the Malla era it was one of four fortified capitals and dominated the trade between India and Tibet. Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha took it in 1768 and made it the capital of the state that came to be called Nepal.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 27.710, 85.320
Worth knowing
The Licchavi city is said to have been laid out in the shape of Chandrahrasa, the sword of Manjushri, the bodhisattva who in the Swayambhu Purana drains the lake that once filled the valley. In the Malla period Nepali coins became the standard currency of trans-Himalayan trade.
About the place
Placed at the city coordinates given on the Wikipedia article.
The Licchavi migration from Vaishali and Gunakamadeva's founding of the city rest on chronicles and tradition; Indra Jatra's own history places the founding in the 10th century.
Connections (12)
- Site withinKathmandu Durbar Square
Kathmandu Durbar Square, the Hanuman Dhoka palace square, is the historic royal centre of the city and one of the valley's three UNESCO-listed Durbar squares. It holds the Kasthamandap, the timber pavilion that gave Kathmandu one of its names, the Kumari Ghar where the living goddess resides, and the nine-storey Nautalle Durbar that Prithvi Narayan Shah built to commemorate the unification of Nepal. It is also the main venue of Indra Jatra, the festival said to commemorate the city's founding.
- Site withinPashupatinath
Pashupatinath stands on the banks of the Bagmati in Kathmandu, a 246-hectare precinct of 518 lesser temples around the gold-covered pagoda of Shiva as Pashupati. Its existence is recorded as early as 400 CE, and it is one of the seven monument groups of UNESCO's Kathmandu Valley listing. The Kathmandu article cites a Shiva Purana passage naming the city of Nayapala as famous for its Pashupati linga, and suggests the name Nepal may derive from that city.
- Site withinSwayambhunath
Swayambhunath crowns a hill on the western edge of Kathmandu, and the city's founding myth is the stupa's myth: in the Swayambhu Purana the valley was a lake until Manjushri drained it so that pilgrims could reach the self-arisen light on a lotus, which became Swayambhu, and he then founded the city of Manjupattan. Licchavi kings added stupas on the hill, and Pratap Malla, the seventeenth-century king of Kathmandu, built the eastern stairway that pilgrims still climb.
- Site withinBoudhanath
Boudhanath, the great stupa of Boudha on the north-eastern side of Kathmandu, stands on the old trade road from Kathmandu to Lhasa. Its present structure was most likely built in the fourteenth century, though Newar chronicles record a stupa there from the fifth, and it was listed by UNESCO in 1979 with the other valley monuments. After 1959 it became the focus of Tibetan refugee settlement, with some fifty monasteries built around it, making Boudha the largest Tibetan quarter in Nepal.
- Site adjacencyPatan Durbar Square
Patan, or Lalitpur, lies about five kilometres south of Kathmandu. In the later Malla period the valley comprised four fortified cities, Kantipur (Kathmandu), Lalitpur, Bhaktapur and Kirtipur, which served as the capitals of a Malla confederation and competed in art, architecture and trade. When Prithvi Narayan Shah attacked Kathmandu on the day of Indra Jatra in 1768, its king Jaya Prakash Malla fled to Lalitpur for refuge, and Patan fell to the Gorkhalis soon after.
- Site adjacencyBhaktapur Durbar Square
Bhaktapur, about thirteen kilometres east of Kathmandu, was the capital of the Nepal Mandala until the fifteenth century, when Kathmandu and Lalitpur were established as capitals of their own, and the three remained rival Malla kingdoms until the Gorkha conquest. After taking Kathmandu and Patan, Prithvi Narayan Shah attacked Bhaktapur and defeated its king Ranajit Malla, a victory that ended the Malla period and left Kathmandu as the capital of the united kingdom.
- Site adjacencyKirtipur
Kirtipur, a Newar hill town about six kilometres south-west of Kathmandu, was one of the four fortified cities of the later Malla valley and belonged to Lalitpur when the Gorkhalis invaded. Wikipedia's Kathmandu article treats the Battle of Kirtipur as the start of the Gorkha conquest of the valley: Prithvi Narayan Shah took the town in 1767 at his third attempt and cut off the noses of its adult inhabitants, a year before he entered Kathmandu itself.
- Site adjacencyChangu Narayan
Changu Narayan stands on a hilltop about twelve kilometres east of Kathmandu, a few miles north of Bhaktapur, and is one of the seven monument groups of UNESCO's Kathmandu Valley listing. Built in the fourth century and dedicated to Vishnu, it is among the oldest Hindu temples in Nepal and holds one of the country's oldest pillar inscriptions, in Sanskrit, of the Licchavi king Manadeva (r. 464–505), of the dynasty under which Kathmandu itself is said to have been founded.
- Successor capital ofGorkha
Gorkha, the hill seat of the Shah dynasty about 140 kilometres west, produced Prithvi Narayan Shah, whose Gorkha Kingdom ended the Malla confederation of the Kathmandu Valley after the Battle of Kathmandu in 1768. Kathmandu was then adopted as the capital of the Gorkha empire, and the empire itself came to be called Nepal. The conqueror marked the change with the nine-storey Nautalle Durbar in Kathmandu Durbar Square, built to commemorate the unification, and the city remained the royal capital until the monarchy was abolished in 2008.
- Trade routeLhasa
Kathmandu grew as a transit point in the trade between India and Tibet. Under the Licchavis the route brought rapid architectural growth, Newar artists carried their work through Tibet and China, and the Nepali princess Bhrikuti, married to the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo, is credited with helping to bring Buddhism to Tibet. In the Malla era Kathmandu dominated the India–Tibet trade and Nepali currency became the standard coin of trans-Himalayan exchange, while Boudha's stupa marked the road out towards Lhasa.
- Traditional linkVaishali
Kathmandu's founding dynasty is traced to Vaishali. In the account given in Wikipedia's Kathmandu article, the Licchavis migrated north from Vaishali in present-day Bihar, defeated the Kirata rulers and established their dynasty in the valley around 400 CE, and the Licchavi ruler Gunakamadeva later merged the settlements of Koligram and Dakshin Koligram into the city of Kathmandu. The link rests on genealogies such as the Gopalraj Vamshavali and on later tradition rather than on contemporary records of a migration.
- Traditional linkIndra Jatra
Indra Jatra is unique to the Kathmandu Valley, and tradition holds that King Gunakamadeva began it to commemorate his founding of Kathmandu, placed by the festival's own history in the tenth century. Its processions follow the old city's routes through Asan, Indra Chowk and Kilagal, and its butter-lamp rite for the year's dead traces the edge of the historic town. The festival's hold on the city was such that Prithvi Narayan Shah chose the day of Indra Jatra in 1768 to attack Kathmandu.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Kathmandu", "Kathmandu Valley", "Kathmandu Durbar Square", "Malla dynasty (Nepal)".
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