Chandra Shamsher Rana

Chandra Shamsher was the hereditary prime minister and maharaja of Nepal from 1901 to 1929, twenty-eight years, the longest of the Rana rulers who governed the country in the king's name for a century. He was the one who abolished slavery, sent the Gurkhas to the world war, and got the country a treaty that called it independent. He took the office by removing his brother Dev, who had been prime minister for a hundred and fourteen days and had wanted to open schools, which the family thought dangerous. He ran the state as the family had run it since Jung Bahadur. The king was a boy in the palace, the country closed, the land the Ranas' and the revenue theirs, the British Resident the only foreigner, and the Terai's forests sold as timber to India. The world war was his. He offered the British the Gurkha regiments and the country's own army. Two hundred thousand men served between 1914 and 1918 and twenty thousand did not come back. The reward was the treaty of December 1923, the first in which Britain recognised the country's independence in writing, and a million rupees a year. That was the price of the men. The reforms were his too and were few. There was the Tri-Chandra college in 1918, which he founded and said would ruin the family. There were the abolition of sati in 1920, and the abolition of slavery in November 1924, fifty-one thousand slaves freed at the state's expense and the owners compensated, which he announced in a speech that took a day. There were the Chandra canal in the Terai, the ropeway and the first railway, and the hydroelectric plant at Pharping that lit the palaces. He was also the Rana who divided the family, by the roll of succession of 1920 that struck the sons of second and third wives from the line. That made the C-class Ranas and, a generation later, the men who helped the Congress bring the family down. He was born in Kathmandu, the fourth of his father's seventeen sons. He went to England in 1908 and came back with an honorary Oxford degree and a taste for Edwardian palaces, of which he built Singha Durbar, seventeen hundred rooms. He died in November 1929. He had ruled the country longer than any of the kings he kept in the palace.

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