History · Nepal

Nepal: The Himalayan Kingdom That Became a Republic

The Kathmandu Valley's temple civilisation, unified by the Gorkha kings in 1768 — a century of Rana dictators, a Maoist war, a palace massacre, and the abolition of a 240-year-old monarchy in 2008

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

The snow-covered pyramid of Mount Everest rising above a wall of jagged Himalayan peaks
Mount Everest — Sagarmatha in Nepali. Nepal contains eight of the world's ten highest mountains along its northern border with Tibet. (Vyacheslav Argenberg / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0)

Three Nepals in one country

Nepal runs in bands from the plains up to the roof of the world: the flat, fertile Terai along the Indian border; the mid-mountain hills, including the Kathmandu Valley; and the high Himalaya. Its 30 million people speak more than a hundred languages and belong to dozens of ethnic groups. It is a Hindu-majority country that is also the birthplace of the Buddha, and it was, until 2008, the world's last Hindu kingdom — a monarchy 240 years old that a Maoist insurgency and a street revolution together brought down.

A short history

  1. c. 400–750 CE

    The Licchavi

    A golden age in the Kathmandu Valley.

  2. c. 1200–1769

    The Malla period

    The valley's temple civilisation; three rival city-kingdoms.

  3. 1768

    Gorkha unification

    Prithvi Narayan Shah conquers the valley and founds the Kingdom of Nepal.

  4. 1814–1816

    Anglo-Nepalese War

    Nepal cedes a third of its territory; the Gurkha recruitment begins.

  5. 1846–1951

    The Rana autocracy

    Hereditary prime ministers rule; the kings are figureheads.

  6. 1951

    Revolution

    The Ranas are overthrown; the monarchy is restored to power.

  7. 1960–1990

    The Panchayat

    A partyless, king-centred system.

  8. 1996–2006

    The Maoist "People's War"

    Around 17,000 killed.

  9. 2001

    The royal massacre

    The crown prince kills most of the royal family.

  10. 2008

    The republic

    The monarchy is abolished.

The valley civilisation

The Kathmandu Valley — once a lake, then a fertile bowl — was Nepal's historical core and a key stop on the trade route between India and Tibet. The Licchavi dynasty presided over an artistic golden age; then, in the Malla period, the valley split after 1482 into three rival city-kingdoms — Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur — which competed for centuries in building temples and palaces.

Valley and plain

A domed stone temple, a large bell under a pavilion and red-brick palace buildings around a paved square in Patan
Patan Durbar Square, at the centre of Lalitpur — one of the three Durbar Squares of the Kathmandu Valley, all of them UNESCO World Heritage Sites. (Alexander Shafir / Wikimedia Commons)
The white Maya Devi Temple and a sacred pool at Lumbini, the Buddha's birthplace
Lumbini, in the Terai — the birthplace of the Buddha in the 6th or 5th century BCE, marked by an Ashokan pillar and now a UNESCO site. (Rangan Datta / Wikimedia Commons)

Unification, and the British

Prithvi Narayan Shah, ruler of the small hill state of Gorkha, conquered the Kathmandu Valley in 1768 and unified the surrounding territories into the Kingdom of Nepal. His successors expanded aggressively across the Himalaya until they collided with the British East India Company. The Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814–16 cost Nepal about a third of its territory and brought a British Resident to Kathmandu — and produced the lasting arrangement by which Britain recruits Nepalis into its army.

The kingdom and the Gurkhas

A statue of King Prithvi Narayan Shah pointing forward, in traditional dress and crown
Prithvi Narayan Shah, who unified Nepal from 1768. His Shah dynasty reigned for 240 years. (Rajivkilanashrestha / Wikimedia Commons)
Gurkha soldiers in trenches at Gallipoli in 1915
Gurkha soldiers at Gallipoli, 1915. Nepalis have served in the British and later Indian armies since 1816 — a defining element of Nepal's foreign image and a major source of income. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Ranas, and the long road to democracy

In 1846, after a court massacre, Jung Bahadur Rana made himself hereditary prime minister, and the Rana family ruled as absolute dictators for over a century, keeping the Shah kings as prisoners in their palaces and Nepal deliberately isolated and undeveloped. A 1951 uprising, backed by newly independent India, overthrew the Ranas and restored the monarchy — but a promised democracy was cut short in 1960, when King Mahendra banned political parties and imposed the partyless "Panchayat" system, which lasted 30 years.

A pro-democracy movement in 1990 forced a constitutional monarchy with multiparty politics. The 1990s brought weak coalitions, corruption, and deepening rural poverty and caste exclusion.

The war, the massacre, and the republic

In 1996 the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), led by "Prachanda", launched a "People's War" that spread across the countryside and killed around 17,000 people over a decade.

Maoist leaders Baburam Bhattarai and Prachanda at a public event
Prachanda (right) and Baburam Bhattarai. After the 2006 peace accord the Maoists entered politics and, as the largest party in a constituent assembly, helped abolish the monarchy in 2008. (Krish Dulal / Wikimedia Commons)

On 1 June 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra shot dead King Birendra and most of the royal family at a palace dinner before killing himself. Birendra's unpopular brother Gyanendra became king, and in 2005 seized absolute power to crush the Maoists. It backfired: the parties and the Maoists allied, a mass movement in April 2006 forced Gyanendra to yield, and a peace accord that November ended the war. A constituent assembly abolished the 240-year-old monarchy on 28 May 2008, and Nepal became a federal democratic republic.

Nepal now

A long, fractious constitution-writing process finally produced the 2015 constitution — promulgated just weeks after a major earthquake that killed around 9,000 people, and amid violent protests in the Terai by Madhesi groups who felt excluded, followed by a crippling border blockade.

Cranes and scaffolding around the rebuilding of the tall white Dharahara tower in Kathmandu
The Dharahara tower in Kathmandu under reconstruction. The 19th-century tower collapsed in the 2015 earthquake, killing scores of people; it has since been rebuilt. (Janak Bhatta / Wikimedia Commons)

Politics since has been chronically unstable, with a small set of leaders cycling through the premiership, and Nepal balancing between India — its traditional partner, sharing an open border — and China. In 2025 a youth-led uprising against corruption and a social-media ban toppled the government and installed an interim administration.

What Nepal carries

Nepal was never colonised, but it spent the century of the Ranas sealed off and kept backward, and it entered democracy late and unevenly. The Maoist war forced open the questions the monarchy and the old parties had avoided — caste, ethnicity, the exclusion of the Terai and the hill minorities, federalism — and the republic since 2008 has been the long, unfinished argument about how to answer them.

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