The Car Porters of Thankot: When Men Carried Automobiles

Until 1956 there was no motorable road into the Kathmandu Valley. That single sentence is the whole explanation, and it is more extraordinary than it first sounds, because Kathmandu in the 1930s and 1940s was a capital city with a palace quarter, a court, imported European furniture and a ruling family with a serious appetite for motor cars.

The transport chain stopped well short. Goods came by rail to the Nepali border and on the short Nepal Government Railway to Amlekhganj, and a road ran on to Bhimphedi at the foot of the hills. Beyond Bhimphedi there was a trail, and the trail crossed the Mahabharat range and then the Chitlang ridge before descending to Thankot on the valley floor. Anything that was going to reach Kathmandu crossed that stretch on a human back or an animal, and there was no exception made for machinery.

So Nepal arrived at the situation that produced the photographs: cars in Kathmandu, driving on a small network of streets inside the valley, that had physically been carried in over a mountain range by men on foot. There was a short ropeway carrying general freight over part of the route from the 1920s, but the cars went the old way.

A car destined for a Rana prime minister or the palace made a journey of several legs.

It arrived by ship at Calcutta and travelled by rail across northern India to the Nepali border at Raxaul. From there it went on to Amlekhganj, and by road to Bhimphedi, sometimes driven under its own power on the last drivable stretch. At Bhimphedi the road ended.

The carried stage crossed the hills to Chitlang and then over the ridge and down to Thankot, with variations in the exact line taken. Accounts of the porter routes name Chitlang, Kushle Chaur, Markhu, Pauwa, Kulekhani and Phakhel among the stages, and the porters themselves were recruited in numbers from the villages of Makwanpur along the way. The journey from Bhimphedi to Thankot is consistently described as taking about eight days.

Thankot is where it ended, and that is why this is a Thankot story rather than a Bhimphedi one. The valley floor at Thankot is where the motorable ground began. Cars were set down here, put back together, and driven the last twelve kilometres into Kathmandu on their own wheels, which after eight days on the shoulders of a hundred men must have been an odd thing to watch.

The engineering is straightforward and the execution was not.

First, reduce the load. Wheels, tyres, seats, bumpers, glass, fittings and anything else removable came off and were carried separately by individual porters, in some cases including the engine. What was left was the body and chassis, still weighing a great deal but no longer a car in any useful sense.

Second, build the frame. The shell was lashed onto a grid of stout timber and long bamboo poles, arranged so that the poles projected on both sides at heights that shoulders could reach. This distributes the load across a large number of men and, critically, lets the team change shape on the trail: a narrower formation on a ledge, a wider one on open ground.

Third, move together. Accounts give teams of sixty to around a hundred men on a single vehicle, and one documented crew consisted of sixty-four porters plus the man recounting it. A load like that can only be moved if every man steps at the same moment, which is why the work was done to rhythmic chanting led by one voice. On steps, on a ledge, on a log bridge over a river, the difference between a coordinated team and an uncoordinated one is the difference between a slow day and a fatal one.

Then do it for eight days, sleeping on the trail, in a country where the weather can close in on a ridge in twenty minutes.

This is the part most accounts skip, and it is the part that matters. The men who carried the cars were hill villagers recruited in large numbers from Makwanpur and the settlements along the route, working for wages, doing the heaviest transport labour available in the country.

Some of them were still alive to be interviewed. Nepali Times traced surviving car carriers in the villages along the old route and published their accounts. One of them, Dhan Bahadur, was eighty-nine when interviewed and described carrying around thirty cars over a working life of some twenty years, in a team of sixty-four men, on the eight-day stage to Thankot. Those are the numbers that make the practice concrete: not one heroic journey but a trade, done repeatedly, by named people, within living memory.

It is worth resisting the temptation to make this picturesque. It was extremely hard, poorly paid work, undertaken so that a very small number of extremely wealthy men could own motor cars in a city where almost nobody could. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the photographs are remarkable precisely because they show the arrangement without comment.

The vehicle histories are collected enthusiastically in Nepal and it is worth being careful with them, because the good stories have travelled further than the evidence.

What is reasonably well established: the first motor car brought into Nepal is generally credited to 1922 and associated with the visit of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, for a shoot in the Chitwan lowlands. Chandra Shumsher Rana, prime minister until 1929, was the first Nepali to own a car for his own use, and private ownership was effectively restricted to the ruling elite. Through the 1930s and 1940s further cars came, and a Mercedes-Benz delivered for King Tribhuvan around 1940 is among the vehicles associated with the porter route.

What is contested: the persistent claim that one of the Mercedes brought over the hills was a car formerly belonging to Adolf Hitler. The story circulates widely, including in international motoring press, and the documentation offered for it has never been convincing. Treat it as an attractive claim that has not been demonstrated.

A number of these vehicles survive in Nepal in private collections and in the Narayanhiti Palace Museum in Kathmandu, and Nepali vintage car enthusiasts have restored several. Seeing one in the metal, then looking at a photograph of the same body on a bamboo frame with eighty men underneath it, is the fastest way to understand the scale of what was done.

It ended in one year, and cleanly. The Tribhuvan Highway, built with Indian assistance and completed in 1956, put a motorable road from the Indian border through the hills and over the western rim into the valley at Thankot. A jeep drove from Birgunj to Kathmandu, and the entire logic of carrying cars evaporated. By 1957 the practice was finished.

For the porters, a trade disappeared. For Thankot, the change was in the other direction: the town stopped being the place where cars were put back together and became the place where the highway entered the valley, with everything that followed from it. That story is our chronicle on the Tribhuvan Highway.

Very little was recorded at the time about the men who did the work, which is why the interviews collected decades later matter so much. The photographs survived because they were extraordinary. The wages, the routes, the injuries and the names mostly did not.

There is no monument in Thankot to the car porters, which is a gap somebody should fill.

What you can do is walk the ground. The Chitlang side of the ridge is a straightforward and rewarding day walk from the Thankot and Kulekhani direction, and the old trail is still there and still used. Doing an hour of it, unloaded, in good boots, with a bottle of water, gives you a sharper sense of the achievement than any amount of reading.

In Kathmandu, the Narayanhiti Palace Museum holds Rana and royal vehicles from the period. And the photographs themselves are the real archive: a car, a bamboo grid, a hillside, and eighty men looking at the camera.