Kingdoms, caravans and Gurkha villages
Before Nepal was one country these hills were split among the Chaubisi rajya, the twenty-four small kingdoms of the Gandaki basin. Kaski, with its seat at Kaskikot on the ridge west of Pokhara, Lamjung and Tanahun ruled the valleys around the lakes. Gorkha was one of the smallest. Drabya Shah took it in 1559, and his descendant Prithvi Narayan Shah, born in the Gorkha palace in 1723, spent his life absorbing the others, taking Kathmandu in 1768. Kaski itself was folded into the Gorkha state in 1786.
Trade made the towns. Salt, wool and borax came down from Tibet through the Kali Gandaki gorge; grain, cloth and metal went north. Ghorepani, literally 'horse water', was a watering stop for those mule trains. The king of Kaski invited Newar merchant families from Bhaktapur to build a market in Pokhara in the 1770s, and Newars from the same city settled Bandipur on its malaria-free saddle after 1768. Their brick houses and temples still stand in both places.
The hill villages gave the region its other export: soldiers. Gurung and Magar men from Kaski, Lamjung, Syangja and Myagdi have served in British and Indian Gurkha regiments for two centuries, and British Gurkha recruitment selection still runs from a camp in Pokhara. Army pensions built many of the slate-roofed stone houses you will sleep in on the trails, and paid for the schools and water taps beside them.
Modern change came fast. Pokhara had no road until the Siddhartha Highway reached it in 1968; trekkers began arriving soon after, and Lakeside grew from rice fields into a town. In 1986 the Annapurna Conservation Area Project began in Ghandruk with a new idea for Nepal: let villagers manage the forests and the tourism money themselves. Today the area covers 7,629 km2, Nepal's largest protected area, and the villages still sit at its centre.
