Prithvi Narayan Shah and Chandragiri: the Gorkhali Campaign

Between 1744 and 1769 the Gorkha kingdom, under Prithvi Narayan Shah, took the Kathmandu Valley from its three Malla kingdoms and made it the capital of a new state. The campaign lasted twenty-five years, and it was won by controlling the ways into the valley rather than by winning open battles inside it. The Gorkhali lost several of those.

Thankot's part in this is specific and unglamorous. It sits at the foot of the western pass, which is the easiest way into the bowl. Whoever holds it can close that road. In a campaign decided by supply and blockade, that made a small rim town matter far more than its size would suggest.

Chandragiri, the ridge above Thankot, carries the campaign's most repeated story: that Prithvi Narayan Shah stood on the summit, saw the valley laid out below him, and formed the intention that became the unification of Nepal. That episode is chronicle tradition. The dates below are not.

Prithvi Narayan Shah came to the throne of Gorkha in 1743, at about twenty, of a hill kingdom west of the valley with modest resources and no obvious prospects. The campaign that followed can be read as a single strategy carried out patiently over a generation: take the routes first, take the cities last.

• 1744, Nuwakot. The Gorkhali attacked on 26 September 1744 and had the place by 1 October. Nuwakot sat on the trade route between the valley and Tibet. Taking it put a hand on the northern trade at the very start.
• 1757, first assault on Kirtipur. On 28 May 1757 the Gorkhali attacked Kirtipur and were beaten badly on the Tyangla Phant below the town. The commander, Kaji Kalu Pande, was killed. Around 400 Gorkhali died and the king escaped with difficulty.
• 1762, Makwanpur. The Gorkhali took Makwanpur in 1762, closing the southern approach from the plains and cutting the valley off from its supply of arms and salt from the south.
• 1764, second attempt on Kirtipur. A renewed assault failed again, with heavy Gorkhali losses.
• 1766, Kirtipur falls. The third campaign was a blockade, not an assault. After roughly six months, with the town unable to get water or food, Kirtipur surrendered in March 1766. Sources differ on the exact date, with some placing the surrender in 1767.
• 25 September 1768, Kantipur. The Gorkhali entered Kathmandu on the first day of Indra Jatra, when the city was given over to the festival, advancing from several directions at once. Prithvi Narayan Shah declared the new kingdom and moved his capital there.
• 1768, Lalitpur. Patan fell within weeks of Kantipur.
• 1769, Bhaktapur. The last of the three Malla capitals fell, completing the conquest of the valley.

Twenty-five years, and the decisive weapon in almost every stage of it was the closed road.

Kirtipur is a fortified town on a ridge inside the valley, on its western side, and it was the obvious first objective for an army coming over the western rim. It was also very hard to take.

On 28 May 1757 the Gorkhali advanced on it and were met on the open ground of Tyangla Phant, to the north-west of the town, by a Newar force under Kaji Danuvanta, with the three Malla kingdoms having put aside their rivalry to defend it jointly. The Gorkhali were routed. Kaji Kalu Pande, the commander of the army and the king's closest adviser, was killed. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts put the Gorkhali dead at around four hundred, and the king himself got away into the hills with difficulty.

The defeat changed the campaign. It ended any prospect of taking the valley by direct assault and forced the Gorkhali back onto encirclement and blockade, which is what eventually worked. It also removed the man who had shaped the strategy in the first place. Kalu Pande has his own chronicle on this site, including the tomb at Dahachowk above Thankot, where he is buried.

A second assault in 1764 failed as well. Only the third approach, which was not an assault at all, succeeded.

What the Gorkhali did after 1757 was slow and effective. They took the rim rather than the centre: the northern route through Nuwakot, the southern approach through Makwanpur in 1762, and the passes on the west. The valley was progressively cut off from salt, from cotton, from grain in bad years, and above all from arms and gunpowder from the plains.

Thankot's position is the reason it appears in accounts of this phase. It sits on the flat at the foot of the western saddle, where the road from Chitlang and Bhimphedi comes down into the valley. Hold Thankot and the western road is shut. There is no dramatic siege of Thankot to describe, and it would be dishonest to invent one. The town's contribution to the campaign was to be a place where a road could be closed, and it was closed.

The effect on Kirtipur was decisive. When the third campaign came in 1765 and 1766, the town could not be resupplied. After about six months of blockade, in March 1766, its position was hopeless and it surrendered. What followed the surrender is one of the harshest episodes in Nepali history and is contested in the sources: chronicle and later accounts describe a punitive mutilation of the male population of Kirtipur, and historians disagree about its scale and about how much of the account is later hostile embroidery. We record the disagreement rather than resolving it.

With Kirtipur gone the western half of the valley was open, and the end came quickly.

On 25 September 1768 the Gorkhali entered Kathmandu on the first day of Indra Jatra, the city's great autumn festival, when the streets were full, the population was drinking and the court was occupied with ritual. Accounts describe a simultaneous advance from several directions, with the main column entering by way of Naradevi and other forces coming in through Tundikhel and Bhimsensthan. Resistance in the city was limited. Jaya Prakash Malla, the king of Kantipur, escaped to Patan and then to Bhaktapur.

Prithvi Narayan Shah announced the creation of the new kingdom and moved his capital from Gorkha into the valley. Lalitpur fell within weeks. Bhaktapur held out until 1769, and with it the campaign that had opened at Nuwakot twenty-five years earlier was finished.

The choice of Indra Jatra is not incidental and it is well attested. A commander who has spent a quarter of a century learning the value of timing does not walk into a capital on an arbitrary Tuesday.

Here is the story as it is told at Thankot and on the summit. Early in his reign the young king climbed Chandragiri, stood on the ridge at 2,551 m, and looked east over the whole Kathmandu Valley: three cities, terraced fields, temple roofs, more wealth in one bowl than his own kingdom held in total. He is said to have asked what he was looking at, been told, and formed there and then the intention to have it.

What is the status of that account? It belongs to Nepali chronicle tradition and to the literature that grew up around the Dibya Upadesh, the king's dictated testament of the last years of his life. It is not attested by a dated contemporary document written on the day. It is entirely plausible: the route from Gorkha toward the valley goes over this ridge, so he certainly crossed it, and the view is exactly as described.

The second element of the story is religious. The summit holds the shrine of Bhaleshwor Mahadev, which by legend marks the place where the forehead of Sati fell as Shiva carried her body across the earth. Tradition says the king made his offering here and asked for success. That is legend attached to a real shrine, and we mark it as legend.

None of this needs to be true for the ridge to matter. What is certainly true is strategic: from this summit you can see the entire objective, its approaches, its three capitals and the ground between them. Any commander crossing here would have stopped and looked, because the reconnaissance value alone is enormous.

The immediate change was administrative rather than physical. The three-kingdom system that had made the rim posts into bargaining chips between rival courts disappeared, and Thankot became a post of a single centralised state whose capital was now twelve kilometres down the road.

That state was, from the beginning, a state very interested in controlling movement. The Gorkhali had just proved what could be done by holding passes, and they were not about to leave their own western gate loose. The customs regime that runs through the nineteenth century, documented in duty orders that name Thankot directly, grows straight out of this, and is set out in our chronicle on Thankot as customs post.

The Newar fabric of the town survived. Unlike a change of population, a change of ruler left the guthi, the temple and the bazaar intact, which is why the historic core of Thankot is still legible as a Newar settlement rather than a Gorkhali garrison. The Newar Thankot chronicle covers what survived.

Three places, all within a short distance of Thankot, make the campaign concrete.

Chandragiri summit. The cable car runs from the base station near Thankot to 2,551 m in about nine minutes, and the equestrian statue of Prithvi Narayan Shah stands near the top, sword raised, facing the valley. Go on a clear morning between October and March. The view is the point and the haze in the pre-monsoon months will take it away from you.

Dahachowk. The tomb and memorial park of Kalu Pande, the commander killed at Kirtipur in 1757, are north of Thankot in Chandragiri ward 1, with a view tower built in 2021. Details are in the Kalu Pande chronicle.

Kirtipur. Twenty minutes away, and the best preserved of the valley rim towns. Standing on its ridge and looking at the ground below, the reason three Gorkhali campaigns were needed becomes obvious in about a minute.