Thankot as Customs Post: Salt, Trade and the Western Gate

The Kathmandu Valley is a closed bowl with a small number of usable ways in. That single fact governs almost everything in its political history. A ruler who holds the rim controls the food supply, the salt supply, the arms supply and the revenue, and does so with far fewer soldiers than an open frontier would need.

On the western side the usable crossing is the saddle above Thankot, now called Nagdhunga. It is not the only way over the western rim, but it is the lowest, the least exposed in winter and by a wide margin the easiest for loaded porters and pack animals. Thankot sits at the foot of it at about 1,301 m, on the flat, with water, with room to hold traffic. If you wanted to count what entered the valley from the west, this is where you would stand.

Thankot's role therefore has very little to do with the town's own size and everything to do with where it is. The same logic put a post at Sankhu on the north-east, at Chapagaun and the Lele saddle on the south, and at the Bhaktapur approaches on the east. Thankot is simply the busiest of them, because west is the direction the plains are in.

Two trade systems met at this gate, and they carried different things.

The southern system ran up from the Gangetic plain. Loads came north from the Indian border, over the Chure and the Mahabharat, through Bhimphedi, over the Chitlang ridge, and down to Thankot. That last stage, the Chitlang to Thankot leg, was the standard final march for the whole of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Everything that entered the capital from India came over it, including, extraordinarily, entire motor cars carried by hand, which is the subject of our chronicle on the car porters of Thankot.

The northern system ran to Tibet through Kuti and Kerung, and its most important cargo was salt. Himalayan salt from the Tibetan lakes came south by yak and by human load, and Nepali grain went north in exchange. That trade did not pass through Thankot, but Thankot's duty rates were set in relation to it, because the price of salt in Kathmandu depended on how much cheaper or dearer the southern supply was made by the duty at the western gate.

Add the ordinary circulation of the hills to both: oil, cotton cloth, iron, copper vessels, paper, tobacco, buffalo on the hoof, and people, in numbers, on pilgrimage and in service. The gate counted all of it.

Between roughly the fifteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries the valley was divided among the three Malla kingdoms of Kantipur, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur, with Kirtipur and the rim towns attached to one or another and periodically changing hands. Under that arrangement the rim posts mattered twice over: they controlled what came into the valley, and they were bargaining chips between the three courts.

The detailed picture of how Thankot was administered in this period comes from chronicle tradition rather than from a run of surviving customs registers, and it should be described that way. What is clear from the structure of the settlement is that the town was laid out as a route town: a linear bazaar along the road, a temple at the centre, rest houses at both ends. That is the plan of a place built to receive and hold traffic, not a plan that emerged from farming alone. The Newar bazaar chronicle takes that fabric apart in detail.

The other durable inheritance from this period is the shrine. Mahalaxmi at Thankot is a goddess of prosperity standing at the point where prosperity physically entered the valley. Travellers stopped, made an offering and went on. That is not a coincidence of siting, and the temple's own economy depended on it.

The clearest demonstration of what the western gate was worth came when somebody used it against the valley. From the 1750s the Gorkhali under Prithvi Narayan Shah worked steadily around the rim, taking the passes rather than assaulting the cities. Nuwakot fell in 1744, the Tibet trade route was squeezed, Makwanpur fell in 1762, and the southern approaches came under Gorkhali control.

Kirtipur, which sits inside the valley on the western side, held out through three campaigns between 1757 and 1766, and in the end fell to blockade rather than to assault. The population could not be supplied because the ways in were held. Kantipur fell on 25 September 1768, Lalitpur weeks later, and Bhaktapur in 1769. The full sequence, with what is documented and what is chronicle tradition, is set out in our chronicle on the Gorkhali campaign.

The point for Thankot is simple. The town did not decide the campaign by fighting. It decided it by being the place where the road could be closed.

Here the record becomes documentary. Nineteenth century Nepali revenue and customs orders survive in quantity and have been published in English translation, and Thankot appears in them by name as a duty point.

One order of 1855 is worth quoting in substance because of what it shows about how the system worked. Customs authorities at Thankot and at the posts running south to the frontier were instructed not to charge duty on two-thirds of consignments of salt brought up from the south. That is not a general remission. It is a targeted intervention in a price, made by adjusting the rate at named posts, in a year when the government wanted southern salt to reach Kathmandu more cheaply. It tells you that the state understood the western gate as a lever on the capital's cost of living, and used it deliberately.

Orders of this kind are the real texture of Thankot's history in the Rana century: rates set and reset, exemptions for state consignments, disputes over what counted as a single load, instructions on how contraband was to be handled. It is unglamorous, and it is the best-evidenced thing about the town.

Under the Rana regime, from 1846 to 1951, Nepal admitted very few foreigners, and those it admitted travelled on specific permission over specific routes. For most of that century the route was the southern one, and the last checkpoint before Kathmandu was on this side of the rim.

That produces the odd historical image of Thankot as the place where a European traveller, having walked from Bhimphedi over Chitlang, handed over papers and was counted into a capital almost nobody outside the country had seen. The same post that weighed salt decided who saw Kathmandu. The scale of the traffic was tiny and its symbolic weight enormous, and it is one of the reasons the town's name is disproportionately familiar in old accounts of Nepal.

The gate never stopped working, it just changed what it checks. The Thankot and Nagdhunga checkposts remain the point where the Prithvi Highway traffic from Pokhara, Chitwan and the western hills is stopped and counted on its way into Kathmandu. On a normal weekday the tailback of freight at Nagdhunga is a visible, audible fact of life in the town, and the opening of the Nagdhunga tunnel in July 2026 is the first serious change to that geometry in seventy years.

Alongside the police post, Maiti Nepal operates a border surveillance and information desk at Thankot and Nagdhunga, part of the national anti-trafficking network that watches the movement of women and children on the main highway corridors. It is a modern function on a very old idea: a place on the road where somebody looks at who is going through.

If you want to see the continuity in one glance, stand at the Thankot checkpost in the morning and look west up the saddle. Salt went that way. Cars went that way, on shoulders. Freight goes that way now. The gate is the constant.