Lesotho

A mountain kingdom entirely surrounded by one other country, which is why it still exists. Moshoeshoe I built the Basotho nation in the 1820s and 1830s from communities shattered by the Difaqane, holding the flat-topped mountain of Thaba Bosiu against every attack, and when Boer expansion threatened to finish the kingdom he asked for British protection in 1868. The appeal cost him the western lowlands, which stayed with the Orange Free State and are farmed by South Africa still, but it preserved a Basotho state when every comparable polity in the region was absorbed. Rule passed briefly to the Cape, whose attempt to disarm the Basotho produced the Gun War of 1880 and a defeat that returned the territory to London in 1884 - an accident of timing that kept it outside the Union of South Africa in 1910. Independence came on 4 October 1966. The highlands cannot feed the population and the country's principal export was long its men, walking to the Rand to dig gold. The Highlands Water Project now sells water to South Africa instead. No point in the country is below fourteen hundred metres. Maseru is the capital. The country has about 2.3 million people in thirty thousand square kilometres. Sesotho and English are both official. It is one of only three countries entirely surrounded by one other, with San Marino and the Vatican. The Basotho blanket and the mokorotlo hat are national emblems. Snow falls in the highlands most winters, and the country has the highest low point of any nation on earth.

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