Nepal

The only South Asian country never colonised, and the last Hindu kingdom in the world until it voted itself into a republic. Prithvi Narayan Shah unified the Kathmandu valley's city-states and the surrounding hills from 1768, and the Gorkha state that resulted fought Britain to a standstill in 1814 to 1816 - losing territory but keeping independence, and impressing the East India Company enough that it began recruiting Gurkha soldiers, who have served in British and Indian regiments ever since. The Rana family held the office of prime minister hereditarily from 1846 to 1951, reducing the monarchy to ceremony and sealing the country off almost completely; Nepal was closed to outsiders until the 1950s. A Maoist insurgency from 1996 killed around seventeen thousand people. In June 2001 the crown prince shot dead most of the royal family before killing himself, an event that broke the monarchy's standing, and a constituent assembly abolished it in 2008. The country holds eight of the fourteen peaks above eight thousand metres, including Everest, and mountaineering and remittances carry much of the economy. An earthquake in 2015 killed nearly nine thousand people. Kathmandu's valley is a World Heritage site. The country has about thirty million people. Nepali is the official language among more than a hundred spoken. Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, is within its borders. The flag is the only national flag that is not a rectangle. Nepal is landlocked between India and China and has no railways to speak of. Its terrain rises from near sea level in the Terai to the highest point on earth within about two hundred kilometres.

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