You probably heard of Nepal due to the avalanche and flood and terrible destruction there recently. But Nepal is a case-study in suffering. I’d like to tell you more about this country, because it has limited strategic value to the US and other major powers and so it is largely ignored except by the tourists who want to climb Everest. I recently visited Kathmandu for a month and learned whatever you can learn in a month about a poor and globally neglected country.
Hundreds of armed men showed up, including Jung Bahadur, a rising military commander. Jung Bahadur’s forces massacred roughly 30-40 of the assembled nobles. Most of Nepal’s political establishment was suddenly dead, and Jung Bahadur emerged as the country’s dominant political figure, becoming prime minister and later adopting the title Rana (a hereditary warrior/noble title – to formalize his authority). He turned the prime minister’s office into a hereditary dictatorship.
The monarch remained on the throne (he was useful), but hereditary Rana prime ministers exercised political power from 1846 until 1951. The Ranas kept the king, but he was now powerless and the Ranas, as I pointed out above, deliberately isolated Nepal from the world and kept 95% of the people illiterate.
But how do dictators make money in an isolated country where nobody can read and virtually everyone is forced into subsistence farming? Yes, turn to the British during their imperialistic stage. Folks who know a little bit will tell you that Nepal is one of the few countries in Asia that was never colonized. Well, the British didn’t annex Nepal, partly because controlling the country directly was less useful to them than keeping it as a buffer between British India and Tibet.
But the British did fight Nepal in the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814 – 1816, and although the British won the war, they were so impressed by the Gurkha soldiers that they began recruiting them into the British Army. Then, about thirty years later, the Ranas seized power in the Kot Massacre and turned Nepal into a hereditary dictatorship. The Ranas cultivated extremely close relations with the British and supported the continued recruitment of Nepali soldiers into the British military.
So Nepal wasn’t colonized in the conventional sense…instead, the Ranas kept their country formally independent while maintaining a very profitable relationship with the British Empire. Later Rana rulers actually received direct British subsidies in exchange for maintaining Nepal as a loyal ally and supplying Gurkha soldiers to the British military.
Everybody got something out of it: the British got some of the toughest soldiers on earth to fight other peoples, and the Ranas got British support and influence without having to worry too much about anybody challenging their dictatorship. The Ranas got rich by taking over enormous agricultural estates as poor farmers worked their land and the Ranas collected the agricultural income and taxes and they also made money from forests, timber, trade, fines and sundry fees in regard to trade and transport.
In 1951 a newly independent India intervened in Nepal. King Tribhuvan fled to India where armed anti-Rana forces were active. India put pressure on the Rana government and the eventual Delhi compromise was negotiated among the Ranas, King Tribhuvan and the Nepali Congress.
So the newly independent India pushes the Ranas out of power and helps re-establish the king, which was something…better than a family of hereditary dictators that wanted to keep 95% of the people poor and illiterate. Kings tend to take their jobs more seriously, more seriously than dictators lining their pockets by exporting Gurkhas and taking rice as payment from poor farmers.
So Nepal suddenly got kings again and some cared a lot and some tried hard and the last real one, before 10 members of the royal family were shot to death in and around a billiard room at the royal palace (you can pay 1,000 rupees and see the bullet holes), was generally loved by the people and had taken steps to create a constitutional monarchy with democratic leanings, shifting the king from absolute power toward this democratic framework.
All Nepali kings were thought to be the embodiment of Vishnu, but King Birendra was a gentle and kind man who really seemed to fit this situation. Yet, he got shot, probably by his son who had been drinking and smoking marijuana that night, nursing a grudge.
Hold on, you say, what happened to 10 royals in a billiard room? Yes, hold on, because there is some controversy here. Some people think it was the king’s son who shot all these royals in 2001 because the King and Queen opposed his marriage to a specific woman.
But I was at the National Museum with some Chinese friends I made in Nepal and when I pointed to the picture of King Birendra and told them that his son shot him and 8 or 9 other members of his family, two ladies working for the museum as “guards” ran over to correct me and tell me that it is still a mystery as to who shot whom. So it’s a touchy issue and everyone has theories, although the official word is that the son did it.
Gyanendra Shah, Birendra’s younger brother, had not been in the billiard room and became king. He eventually dismissed the government and assumed direct executive power in 2005, which produced mass protests. The people gained a democracy without a monarchy in 2008. Over the past year, the country has seen large youth‑driven anti‑corruption protests, fueled by anger at a political class seen as enriching itself instead of serving the public. So democracy is still a work in progress in Nepal.
So, you go to Kathmandu and you realize how poor this country is because you see that so much is devoted to catering to tourists. There is an overabundance of taxi drivers and bike and e-rickshaw drivers as well as an overabundance of souvenir shops selling everything from wooden masks to tee shirts to gilded Hindu gods to cool-looking traditional Gurkha hats to paintings and posters of Mount Everest to books, posters and paintings of the Living Goddess – a pre-pubescent child embodying Taleju, a goddess, tied to protection and the king’s legitimacy. She is kept mostly in a palace in which Nepalis and tourists can visit and be blessed (for a small fee) when she rubs tika (red stuff) on your forehead.
There are Western style coffee houses all over the place, lots of inexpensive hotels, lots of bars and nightclubs…in fact, an entire section called Thamel caters to the tourists who come to Nepal and who are welcomed and catered to because Nepal just really needs tourist dollars, but you wonder how any of these shops can make money because there are just too many of them selling the same things.
Why do I say they need tourist dollars? Nepal’s government doesn’t receive much revenue as the economy is small, industry is weak and the tax base is thin. A large number of young Nepalis actually leave the country to work in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf states, often in low-paid or physically demanding jobs, so they can send money home to their families.
The Nepali government has advocated for stronger protections recently. In 2025 – 26, the government worked with the ILO on fair recruitment, safer working conditions and social protection for Nepalis in the Gulf. In the meantime, Nepal’s embassy in Qatar actually has a formal procedure specifically for repatriating the bodies of deceased Nepali workers.
There was a terrible glacier‑ice‑rock avalanche on the Nepal-Tibet border, triggering a flash flood that killed hundreds in Nepal and Tibet. Nepal has contributed little to global warming, yet it will keep suffering climate‑driven avalanches for years to come. It is a country that has limited strategic value for the major powers but not enough to command sustained global attention. Its disasters may just flare briefly in the world’s consciousness and then disappear. Pray for Nepal.
all images courtesy of author
