Ten thousand caves and the people who made them
Across Mustang there are some 10,000 man-made caves dug into the walls of valleys, many of them in Upper Mustang near the Kali Gandaki and its side streams. No one is quite sure who first made them or why. Archaeologists divide their use into three broad periods. As early as about 1,000 BC some were used as burial chambers. Around the 10th century, when the region was often fought over, families moved into the caves for safety, turning them into homes. By the 1400s, many had become meditation chambers and storerooms for monasteries.
Since the 1990s, teams of Nepali and foreign archaeologists, mountaineers and conservators have climbed into caves across Lo. In the mid-1990s, researchers from Nepal and the University of Cologne found partially mummified human remains at least 2,000 years old. In 2007 a team found Buddhist paintings and manuscripts in caves near Lo Manthang, and in 2010, at Samdzong, near the Tibetan border, archaeologists found 27 skeletons from the 3rd to 8th centuries with cut marks on the bones, probably from a burial ritual.
Chhoser, once known as Garphu, was a village development committee of its own until 2017, when it became part of Lomanthang rural municipality. Its caves have long been part of village life, used for storage and shelter within living memory. Today the Jhong cave is managed for visitors, the cliff gompas are kept by caretakers, and the village farms barley and keeps animals as before. The caves on the higher cliffs remain out of reach, and most are still unexplored.
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