The fort that opened the road to Kathmandu
In the 1740s Nuwakot belonged to Kantipur, the Malla kingdom of Kathmandu, and it mattered: whoever held the hill controlled the trade route from the valley to Tibet. Gorkha, a small hill kingdom to the west, had already failed once to take it. When the young Prithvi Narayan Shah became king of Gorkha he prepared carefully, bought arms and trained his troops, and on 26 September 1744, a day his astrologer had chosen, attacked the fort. Within days Nuwakot was his. Jaya Prakash Malla of Kantipur tried to win it back the next year and failed.
Prithvi Narayan Shah moved his base to Nuwakot and used it as the staging ground for the long campaign that ended with the fall of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur in 1768 and 1769. On the ridge he built the seven-storey palace as both residence and fortress, with walls about 6 feet thick. The ground floor held guards and courtiers, the king and queen lived higher up, and the fifth and sixth floors were used as a prison: the king of Tanahun was held here. Prithvi Narayan Shah died in Nuwakot in 1775.
Nuwakot stayed important after him. In 1792, during the war with China, Qing troops came close to the fort. In 1793 the British envoy William Kirkpatrick met the regent Bahadur Shah here, and that same year Bahadur Shah fixed a copper plate at the Bhairavi temple recording Nepal's victory and stored captured weapons inside it. Then the capital's business moved to Kathmandu and Nuwakot became a farming village again. The 2015 earthquake cracked the palace and toppled temples; restoration has been slow and careful, and the Bhairavi temple was reopened in 2020.
.jpg){kind=link}