The Kingdom of Lo: a short history of Upper Mustang

Look at a map and the reason for Lo becomes clear. Upper Mustang is a high, dry wedge of land that pushes north from the Himalayan crest into the Tibetan plateau, and the Kali Gandaki valley that runs through it is one of the easiest routes across the mountains. For centuries, salt from the lakes of western Tibet came south along this valley, along with wool, and grain, rice and cloth went north. Whoever held the valley could tax that trade, and the rulers of Lo did.

People had lived in the valley long before any kingdom. The thousands of caves cut into its cliffs, some used as burial chambers more than two thousand years ago, show that. But the Lo that travellers come to see today, with its walled capital, its great monasteries and its royal family, took shape in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Tradition and most histories credit the founding of the kingdom to Ame Pal, a warrior-ruler who unified the area in the second half of the 14th century, with 1380 the date most often given. He is remembered as the builder of Lo Manthang, a compact city on a plain at about 3,840 m, enclosed by thick earthen walls with a single gate. The name is often translated as the plain of aspiration or plain of prayer. The rectangular plan, with the palace and monasteries inside the walls and the fields outside, survives almost intact.

Ame Pal and his successors were devoted patrons of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism, and they invited one of its great teachers, Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo, to Lo in the 15th century. His visits led to a wave of ordination and building. Jampa Lhakhang, with its huge clay Maitreya and its mandala murals, and Thubchen, the tall assembly hall nearby, both date from this period. They are among the finest surviving examples of 15th-century Tibetan Buddhist art anywhere, and the Sakya school still dominates Upper Mustang's monasteries today.

A small kingdom on a trade route has powerful neighbours. Over the following centuries Lo's fortunes rose and fell with those of Tibet to the north and the hill kingdoms to the south and west. At times its kings paid tribute to the Kingdom of Jumla in the Karnali basin. When the Gorkha kings unified Nepal in the late 18th century and defeated Jumla, Lo became part of Nepal, but on unusual terms. Its king kept his title, his palace and much of his authority in local affairs, paying tribute to Kathmandu.

This arrangement lasted, with changes, for more than two hundred years. The Raja of Mustang, as the king became known in Nepali, had a semi-autonomous role in a country otherwise ruled from the capital. Inside Lo, he remained the Lo Gyalpo, the king of Lo, a figure of real respect who sat in honour at festivals such as Tiji.

After China took control of Tibet in 1950 and especially after 1959, the old trade across the northern passes shrank. Lo's position on the border also made it strategic. Through the 1960s, Tibetan resistance fighters used remote corners of Mustang as bases for raids into Tibet, with covert support from the United States for much of that time. The operation ended in 1974, when the Nepal Army moved in and disarmed the fighters.

Partly because of this history, Upper Mustang stayed closed to foreign visitors for decades. A handful of outsiders reached Lo Manthang before then. The French traveller Michel Peissel spent time there in 1964 and wrote one of the first books about it in English. For most of the world, though, Lo remained a name on a map until 1992, when Nepal opened Upper Mustang to trekkers under a restricted-area permit.

Dates for the early centuries are traditional and debated by historians, so treat them as approximate. From the 20th century on, they are firm.

Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista became king of Lo in the 1960s and was, by every account, a quiet and well-loved figure. He lived in the palace in Lo Manthang for part of the year and in Kathmandu for part, and appeared at Tiji each spring. When Nepal abolished its monarchy in 2008, the government also ended the special status of Mustang's king. He lost his title in law, though not in the eyes of many Lobas, who still spoke of him as the Gyalpo.

He died in Kathmandu in December 2016. His death closed a line that, by tradition, ran back to Ame Pal. The palace still stands in Lo Manthang, damaged by the 2015 earthquake and under repair, and members of the family remain involved in local life.

By the 1990s the great monasteries of Lo Manthang were in trouble. Roofs leaked, walls cracked and centuries of butter-lamp smoke had blackened the murals. Beginning in the late 1990s, a long restoration project supported by the American Himalayan Foundation brought in conservators, led for many years by the Italian conservator Luigi Fieni, to work on Thubchen and Jampa Lhakhang.

What makes the project unusual is who did the work. Local Loba men and women were trained as conservators and, over many seasons, cleaned and stabilised the murals themselves. When you stand in Thubchen today and see the colours of the 15th-century paintings, you are looking at work saved partly by the grandchildren of the people who worshipped there. Ask your guide in Lo Manthang about it; often someone in the lodge kitchen has a relative who worked on the walls.

The Lobas of Upper Mustang speak a Tibetan dialect, practise Tibetan Buddhism and farm barley, buckwheat and potatoes on irrigated fields, keeping horses, goats, sheep and yaks. The road from Jomsom has brought jeeps, solar panels, cheaper goods and new lodges, and many young people study or work in Pokhara and Kathmandu. In winter, a large share of the population moves south. But each spring the families come back, the fields are ploughed, and Tiji fills the square below the palace.

For a visitor, the history is not hard to find. It is in the single gate you walk through, the prayer wheels people turn as they pass, the red, white and grey stripes of Sakya paint on chortens, and the way an older man in the lane may still speak of the Gyalpo with respect. Spend an extra day in Lo Manthang if you can. Sit in the Chode courtyard during the evening prayers, walk the outside of the walls at dusk, and ask the family who runs your lodge where their grandparents farmed. You will hear more history in an evening by the stove than any guidebook can give you, and much of it will be about salt, horses and the long winters that shaped this kingdom.