The History of Thankot: Eight Chronicles of the Valley Gate

Thankot is a town of moderate size about 12 km west of central Kathmandu, on the valley floor at roughly 1,301 m, at the foot of the Chandragiri hills. Its history is out of all proportion to its size, and there is a single reason for that.

The Kathmandu Valley is a closed bowl. There are only a handful of practical ways into it, and on the western side there is effectively one: the saddle above Thankot, now called Nagdhunga. Everything arriving from the middle hills, from the plains of India by way of Chitlang and Bhimphedi, and from the whole of western Nepal has come over that saddle and down into Thankot. Salt came this way. Grain, cotton, iron and kerosene came this way. Armies came this way, or failed to. In the twentieth century motor cars came this way on the shoulders of a hundred men at a time, and in 1956 the first road into the valley came this way too.

A town in that position accumulates history whether or not anything remarkable is happening in it. It is a gate, and gates are where things get counted, taxed, blocked, defended and remembered.

Most writing about Thankot's past mixes three different kinds of statement together, and the mixing is why so much of it is unreliable. Everything on this site is sorted into one of three categories, and each chronicle states which one it is working in.

Legend is Puranic and mythological material. The story that Thankot was Shonitapura, the city of blood, capital of the thousand-armed asura Banasura, comes from the Bhagavata Purana and its relatives. It is a real and old local tradition. It is not evidence that a city of that name stood here, and the identification is claimed at least as strongly by Tezpur in Assam. We call it legend every time it appears.

Chronicle tradition is the vamshavali material: the Nepali genealogical chronicles, compiled and recompiled under the Mallas and the Shahs. The Kirat king lists, the founding dates of temples, the sayings attributed to kings and the story of the vision from the Chandragiri ridge all live here. This material often preserves genuine memory and is often tidied. We attribute it rather than stating it flat.

Documented history is what can be tied to a dated inscription, a surviving order, a survey, a photograph or a published record. At Thankot this becomes substantial from the eighteenth century: the campaign dates of the Gorkhali unification, the nineteenth century customs orders naming Thankot as a duty point, the porter transport recorded in photographs and in interviews with the men who did it, and the construction of the Tribhuvan Highway.

None of the three is worth less than the others. They simply answer different questions, and a page that blurs them is not doing its reader any favours.

Read in order, the eight chronicles below tell one story, and it is the story of a road.

It opens with a legend that explains why this ground feels contested, and with a chronicle tradition that gives the valley Kirat rulers before the Licchavis. Neither can be dated at Thankot, but the geography behind both is real: this saddle was in use long before anybody wrote anything down about it.

The Malla centuries give the town the shape it still has. A linear bazaar along the trade road, a pagoda temple to Mahalaxmi at its centre, dated locally to about 1690, rest houses at both ends and a set of guthi trusts that fund and run the ritual year. Mahalaxmi is one of the Ashta Matrika, the eight mother goddesses who hold boundaries in the valley's sacred geography, and putting her at the western gate is entirely consistent with what that system is for.

The eighteenth century turns the gate into a weapon. Between 1744 and 1769 the Gorkhali under Prithvi Narayan Shah took the Kathmandu Valley by holding its approaches rather than by storming its cities. They lost badly at Kirtipur in 1757, where the Mul Kaji Kalu Pande was killed and is buried on the ridge above Thankot at Dahachowk. They came back with a blockade, took Kirtipur in 1766, entered Kantipur on the first day of Indra Jatra in 1768, and finished at Bhaktapur in 1769.

The nineteenth century is the least dramatic and the best documented. Thankot appears by name in Nepali revenue orders as a duty point, including an 1855 order relieving two-thirds of the duty on salt brought up from the south. This is the town at its most characteristic: a place where the state adjusted a number and the price of salt in Kathmandu moved.

The twentieth century produces the two chronicles people remember. Until 1956 no road reached the valley, so cars for the Rana and royal households were stripped down, lashed to timber and bamboo frames and carried over the hills from Bhimphedi by teams of sixty to a hundred men, taking about eight days, and reassembled at Thankot. Then the Tribhuvan Highway opened, entering the valley over Nagdhunga, and ended that trade in a single year.

The story is still running. In July 2026 the Nagdhunga to Sisnekhola tunnel, 2.68 km and Nepal's first road tunnel, was inaugurated. It is the largest change to this corridor in seventy years, and like the highway before it, it will reshape the town that sits at the bottom of the pass.

Every chronicle carries a byline, a published date and a last-checked date, and lists the categories of source consulted. Where a date is contested in the literature, we give the range and say who disagrees rather than picking the tidier number. Where a local attribution is not backed by a published inscription, we say that too.

We do not invent citations. The source lists on these pages name genuine categories of material: published translations of the Puranas and the vamshavali, the Regmi Research translations of nineteenth century Nepali revenue orders, Department of Archaeology monument records, JICA project documentation, Nepali press archives, municipal notices, guthi accounts, and interviews and site visits carried out by our own researchers. If we have not seen a document, it is not in the list.

Corrections are welcome and are acted on. If you hold a family or guthi record that bears on any of this, particularly on the Mahalaxmi temple foundation or on the porter trade, we would like to hear from you through the contact page.