Kathmandu: Durbar Square & the Old City

This square was the royal ceremonial center of the Kathmandu Valley for centuries. The Malla dynasty, which ruled from roughly the twelfth to the eighteenth century, was responsible for most of what you see here. The Mallas were builders and patrons of the arts on a tremendous scale. They constructed not only temples but systems of urban life — the bazaars, the water fountains called hiti, the rest houses for travellers called pati, the great courtyards called chowks. At the peak of Malla rule the Kathmandu Valley was divided into three competing kingdoms — Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur — each with its own durbar square and its own tradition of architectural one-upmanship. That competition produced an astonishing concentration of medieval architecture in a very small area.

In seventeen sixty-eight Prithvi Narayan Shah, the king of the hill kingdom of Gorkha, unified the valley kingdoms and founded what became the modern Nepali state. The Shah dynasty moved into these palaces and added their own buildings over the following centuries. The palace complex immediately behind you — the Hanuman Dhoka — layers Malla and Shah-era buildings against the hillside in a long, interconnected warren of courtyards and towers.

Take a moment before you move deeper into the square. Count the rooftops you can see from here. The tiered pagoda form — one, two, or three diminishing roofs stacked above the shrine chamber — is not borrowed from India or China. It evolved here in the Kathmandu Valley and is one of the most recognisable architectural contributions Nepal has made to the world. Look at the carved wooden struts supporting each roof tier: every one of them is carved with a deity, a narrative scene, or an erotic image whose symbolic role is the protection of the sacred space from evil spirits. The carvings are extraordinary in their detail and, in many cases, their explicitness.

The selection process for a new Kumari is lengthy and precise. Candidates are evaluated against a list of thirty-two physical attributes — a lotus-shaped body, thighs like a deer, a chest like a lion, a voice as soft as a duck's are among the qualities sought. The girl must also demonstrate composure and fearlessness through ritual tests conducted at night in a courtyard filled with the heads of sacrificed animals and men dressed as demons, with loud music and darkness. A girl who does not cry or show fear passes. She is then examined by astrologers for a compatible horoscope with the reigning head of state.

Once selected, the Kumari lives in this building, cared for by her family but elevated to divine status. She does not attend school — tutors come to her. She rarely walks on the ground, as her feet are considered sacred. On festival days she is dressed in red, her eyes outlined in black, a third eye painted on her forehead, and borne through the streets of the old city in a gilded chariot. When devotees are granted an audience, she sits motionless on a throne while they prostrate before her.

When a Kumari reaches puberty, or bleeds from any wound, her divine status is considered to have departed and she returns to ordinary life. A new Kumari is selected. The transition from goddess to ordinary girl — and the questions about the long-term effects of this childhood — have become subjects of both scholarly study and controversy. Former Kumaris have spoken publicly about the difficulties of reintegration, and Nepal has in recent years debated the tradition's future. For now it continues, and if you are patient and quiet in this courtyard, you may glimpse the Kumari's face briefly appearing at the carved window above — an appearance she controls entirely.

On the twenty-fifth of April, two thousand and fifteen, at eleven fifty-six in the morning, an earthquake of magnitude seven point eight struck Nepal. The epicentre was northwest of Kathmandu near the town of Barpak in Gorkha district, roughly eighty kilometres from where you are standing. The shaking lasted approximately fifty seconds. In those fifty seconds, Kasthamandap collapsed. So did dozens of temples and historical structures across this square and throughout the old city. Nearly nine thousand people died across Nepal. Hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed. Kathmandu Durbar Square, Patan Durbar Square, and Bhaktapur Durbar Square — all three valley capitals, all three UNESCO World Heritage Sites — suffered devastating losses.

The site where Kasthamandap stood was cleared of rubble, and reconstruction has been a long, contested, and underfunded process. In twenty twenty-two a reconstructed Kasthamandap was inaugurated, built using traditional Newari methods and materials where possible, incorporating salvaged elements from the original structure. Whether a reconstruction constitutes the continuation of a monument or a tribute to it is a question heritage professionals continue to debate. What is certain is that the community that gathered here — the vendors, the pilgrims, the children playing on the steps, the old men doing nothing in particular — returned before the walls were even finished. That continuity is as much the monument as the building.

Stand here and look across the square. The gaps in the roofline, the rebuilt platforms, the scaffolding on some structures, the explanatory signs in English and Nepali — all of it is the landscape of a city that survived something enormous and is continuing. Kathmandu is not a museum of the past. It is a living place working out what it is now.

The junction takes its name from the Annapurna Temple that sits at its centre — the goddess Annapurna, deity of food and nourishment, is an entirely appropriate patroness for a market that has sold food and household goods since the medieval period. The temple is modest in scale but extremely active. The brass figure inside is dressed and garlanded fresh each morning, and the smell of fresh flowers mixes with the market smells around it. Devotees stop to touch the gate, press their hands together, and move on. The sacred and the commercial have occupied the same space here for so long that no one involved makes a distinction.

The Newari people — the indigenous inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley — built this city and its economy. The Newars were among the great trading communities of the medieval Himalayan world, serving as the merchants and intermediaries between the Indian plains to the south and Tibet to the north. Kathmandu sat on one of the principal trans-Himalayan trade routes, and Newari traders were the ones who moved goods through it. Silk, salt, wool, spices, and grain all passed through markets like this one. The Newars accumulated the wealth that built the temples and pagodas of the valley, and their culture — their festivals, their food, their distinctive architecture, their ritual calendar — is the foundation on which the modern city rests.

At Ason you can buy almost anything. Vegetables and dried grains in loose piles. Bolts of fabric. Plastic kitchenware stacked from floor to ceiling. Incense in every form. Religious images in brass and gilt. The market has modernised in the obvious ways — phones and synthetic materials have joined the traditional goods — but its pace and density and the way it organises itself around the temple at its centre has not changed in any way that matters.

The streets around Indra Chowk are the textile quarter of the old bazaar. Look into the shops and you will see bolts of cotton and silk, the warm woollen cloth woven in Nepal's hill communities, pashmina and cashmere goods of varying quality, embroidered fabrics, thangka paintings on silk. Traders here have been selling fabric since the valley's commercial peak in the medieval period, when Kathmandu's position on the India-Tibet trade route made it a distribution point for cloth moving in both directions.

The architecture of the buildings surrounding the junction gives you a concentrated view of Newari commercial vernacular: the narrow facades, the carved wooden windows on the upper floors, the ground floors opened entirely to the street as shops. Many of these buildings are several hundred years old in their structure, despite having been plastered, painted, and modified over the centuries. Nepal's earthquake history means that all of them carry repairs from various periods — the valley is seismically active, and major earthquakes have struck repeatedly over the centuries. The ones that survived are the ones that were well built or well maintained or simply lucky.

The incense smoke thickens here toward the small shrines tucked into almost every corner and alcove of the junction. A brass lamp burns before a stone lingam. A garland of marigolds is draped over a gilded image so small and dark with oil and smoke that it is almost impossible to make out the deity beneath. These are not tourist attractions. They are the working religious infrastructure of a neighbourhood that has organised its daily life around its gods for as long as it has existed.

What you are likely to see, depending on the time of day, is a cremation in progress. The Hindu tradition holds that cremation on the banks of the Bagmati, which flows eventually to the Ganges and then to the sea, enables the soul of the deceased to achieve moksha — liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Families bring their dead here from across the valley and from considerable distances within Nepal. The fires on the ghats burn throughout the day and into the evening. The smoke rises and carries the smell of wood and sandalwood and the ceremonies that accompany the process — the prayers of the family, the ritual washing of the body, the offerings placed at the water's edge.

This is not a performance for visitors. It is one of the most important moments in the lives of the families gathered here, and the atmosphere around the ghats carries the particular quality of concentrated grief and religious purpose. If you visit, move quietly, do not photograph the fires or the mourners directly, and be aware that the area closest to the ghats is the private space of families conducting the most significant ritual of their tradition.

The temple complex extends back from the river in a large walled precinct containing numerous subsidiary shrines, dharamsalas, ashrams, and the gathering places of sadhus — the wandering Hindu ascetics who come to Pashupatinath from across the subcontinent. The sadhus you will see on the eastern bank are among the most visibly extraordinary people in any city in the world: ash-covered bodies, matted hair, orange robes or nothing at all, carrying tridents, sitting in meditation, doing nothing discernible with total apparent commitment. They are pilgrims at the end of long journeys, and this is their destination.

The climb to the top involves three hundred and sixty-five stone steps rising steeply up the wooded hillside, lined with stone Buddhas, prayer wheels, and votive offerings. You will reach the top breathing hard regardless of your fitness. At the summit the stupa's whitewashed dome rises above a broad platform ringed with prayer flags, smaller shrines, and the perpetual circumambulation of devotees walking clockwise — always clockwise — around the stupa while spinning the large copper prayer wheels set into the walls.

The eyes painted on all four sides of the stupa's square tower are perhaps the most recognisable image in all of Nepal. They are the all-seeing eyes of the Buddha, looking out in the four cardinal directions from beneath a third eye of wisdom. Between and beneath the two eyes is a symbol that resembles a nose but is actually the Nepali numeral for one — representing the unity of all things, the oneness beyond apparent multiplicity. The eyes gaze out over the valley with an expression that resists easy interpretation. Not judgement, not compassion exactly — something more encompassing than either.

Swayambhunath is a shared site. Buddhists and Hindus both worship here, as they have since the earliest records of the site in the fifth century. The large Buddha figures are Buddhist. The small Hindu shrines at the base and in the surrounding precincts are Hindu. The same person may stop at both on the same visit. In the Kathmandu Valley this is not syncretism — the blending of two traditions into a compromise — but a genuine dual inheritance that Newari culture has maintained without resolving for well over a thousand years.

Kaiser Sumsher's garden — the Kaisar Bageecha — was designed and built between nineteen oh one and nineteen nineteen. It was intended as a private pleasure ground for the Rana family. The three main pavilions that remain — named after the seasons Spring, Summer, and Winter — are built in a hybrid style that mixes European columns and arched windows with Nepali decorative details. The fountain basin in the centre of the garden has been restored and the water runs again. The hedges have been trimmed back to something approaching their original geometry.

The garden fell into severe disrepair after the end of Rana rule. It was restored and reopened in two thousand and six through a joint project between the Austrian and Nepali governments, and the restoration was careful and largely successful. It is now one of the few quiet public spaces in central Kathmandu — a place where you can sit on a bench and hear birds, where the light falls differently than it does in the lanes outside, where the pace slows.

The cafe that operates from one of the pavilions serves good coffee. This is not an irrelevant detail. In a city where you will have been walking through intense sensory experience for hours, the Garden of Dreams offers something genuinely valuable: the possibility of sitting still for a moment and letting what you have seen settle.

The trekking industry that Thamel serves is one of Nepal's most important economic sectors. Nepal has eight of the ten highest mountains in the world, including Everest — Sagarmatha in Nepali, meaning Forehead of the Sky. The climbing and trekking routes that access these mountains have brought significant income to Nepal since mountaineering became a major international pursuit in the mid-twentieth century. Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa climber who reached the summit of Everest with Edmund Hillary on the twenty-ninth of May, nineteen fifty-three, was a Nepali citizen, and his role in that ascent is a source of sustained national pride.

Thamel took damage in the two thousand and fifteen earthquake, though less than the old city. Many of the buildings here are newer and built in reinforced concrete, which performed better than the traditional brick and timber construction of the historic districts. The neighbourhood recovered quickly — it had to, because its economy depends almost entirely on the continuous arrival of visitors, and Kathmandu's tourism sector was devastated by the earthquake and the aftershocks that continued for months.

What Thamel gives you that the old city cannot is perspective. Walking from Durbar Square through the old bazaars to this neighbourhood, you travel across the full spectrum of how Kathmandu presents itself to the world — the ancient and the adaptive, the sacred and the commercial, the local and the globalised — all compressed into a walking distance that a reasonably fit person covers in less than an afternoon.

The nature of Boudhanath changed dramatically in nineteen fifty when Tibet came under Chinese administration and Tibetan refugees began arriving in Nepal. Boudhanath became the centre of Tibetan Buddhist life in exile. The monasteries — gompas — that ring the circumambulation plaza were built largely by Tibetan refugee communities from the nineteen sixties onward, representing multiple schools of Tibetan Buddhism: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug all have a presence here. The monks, nuns, and lamas who study and practise in these monasteries have made Boudhanath one of the most important centres of Tibetan Buddhist scholarship outside Tibet itself.

Walking the kora — the circumambulation path around the stupa — you join a procession that includes elderly Tibetan women in traditional chuba robes counting beads on their malas, young monks in burgundy and saffron, Nepali Buddhists, Hindu pilgrims for whom the stupa is also sacred, tourists, and the occasional pilgrim who prostrates the full circumference of the stupa by lying flat on the ground with each step. The prayer wheels set into the stupa's base wall stretch the entire circuit — hundreds of them, each inscribed with mantras, each one spinning as hands reach out to turn it. The most common sound in the plaza is the soft continuous rushing of those wheels.

The two thousand and fifteen earthquake damaged the stupa's spire and the uppermost section of the tower. Restoration was completed in two thousand and sixteen with support from the government and the Boudhanath community. The rebuilt spire is structurally sound, and the stupa returned to full ceremonial use quickly. The Tibetan Buddhist community here is resilient in ways that go beyond architecture — they have been maintaining a practice tradition in conditions of displacement and loss for decades. The stupa is the centre of that practice, and it will stand here, with those eyes watching the valley, long after everything you have seen today has been rebuilt again.