Winter capital of the Khasa emperors
The Khasa Malla kings ruled from two capitals: Sinja in Jumla for the summer, and Dullu, warmer and lower, for the winter. At the empire's height under Prithvi Malla in the 14th century, its territory reached from Guge and Purang in Tibet to Dullu in the south-west and Kaskikot near Pokhara in the east. Scholars who have studied the site note how closely the palace and the flame temples were linked; the kings drew part of their authority from this sacred landscape.
In 1357 (Shaka 1279) Prithvi Malla set up an inscribed stone pillar at Dullu. Its text, studied by the scholar Yogi Naraharinath, lists the kings before him back to Nagaraj, who founded the capital at Semja, the Sinja of today. It remains one of the most important sources for the history of the Khasa empire.
When the empire broke up, Dullu became one of the twenty-two Baise kingdoms. Remarkably, it survived as a small principality under the Nepali state until the early 1960s, when it was absorbed fully under King Mahendra. Today Dullu is a municipality of farming villages, with schools, a busy bazaar and a steady flow of pilgrims to the flames.
