Prithvi Narayan Shah
Prithvi Narayan Shah was the king of Gorkha, a hill principality of a few thousand houses west of Kathmandu, who in twenty-five years of war took the three Newar kingdoms of the Kathmandu valley, Kathmandu itself in 1768 while its king was watching the Indra festival, and the hill states east to the Tista, and so made the kingdom of Nepal, which his dynasty ruled until 2008. He wrote or dictated at the end of his life the Dibya Upadesh, the divine counsel, which told his heirs that the country was a yam between two boulders, China and the Company, and should keep both out. He was born in Gorkha in 1723 and became its king at twenty in 1743, the tenth of a line of Rajput-descended Shah rulers who had held the hill fort for two centuries. The valley was rich, divided among three cousins who fought each other, and the road to Tibet ran through it. He began by taking Nuwakot on the Tibet road in 1744, spent twenty years in blockade and siege of the valley's approaches, and cut off the noses and lips of the people of Kirtipur when it fell in 1766 after three sieges, an act his chroniclers record and his admirers explain. The Newar king of Kathmandu asked the East India Company for help, and a Company captain led a force of two thousand sepoys into the hills in 1767 that malaria and the Gorkhalis destroyed at Sindhuli, the first British defeat in the Himalaya and the reason Nepal was never a colony. Kathmandu fell on 25 September 1768, Patan a fortnight later, and Bhaktapur, where the three kings had gathered, in November 1769. He moved his capital to Kathmandu and kept the Newar cities' festivals and their trade. The armies went on east into the Kirat country and west toward the Gandaki, where the Chaubisi rajas held them, and the conquest continued under his successors until the war with the Company in 1814 fixed the borders that Nepal has. He expelled the Capuchin missionaries, closed the valley to Europeans, and told his heirs to buy nothing from India that could be made at home. He died at Devighat on the Trisuli in January 1775, aged fifty-two, and the Dibya Upadesh is still quoted by Nepali politicians as scripture.
- Lived: 1723 CE – 1775 CE
- Nationality: Nepali
- Roles: king, monarch, founder
