From lake bed to the cities of the Mallas
Geologists agree with the old stories on one point: the Kathmandu Valley was once a lake. Its soft black clay, the kind that names the Kalimati neighbourhood, is lake sediment, and it is why rice grows so well here and why buildings shake so hard in earthquakes. People settled the drained basin early, and by the Licchavi period, roughly the 5th to 9th centuries CE, kings were carving Sanskrit inscriptions, building water spouts and endowing temples. Changunarayan's pillar of 464 CE and Patan's Manga Hiti date from this time.
From about the 12th century the Malla kings ruled, and in the 15th century the kingdom split among heirs into the rival cities of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur. Competition made them builders. Each king tried to outdo the others with palaces, pagodas, courtyards and stepped tanks, and much of what you see in the three Durbar Squares dates from the 17th and early 18th centuries, under kings such as Pratap Malla, Siddhi Narasimha Malla and Bhupatindra Malla.
In 1768 Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha took Kathmandu during Indra Jatra, after years of blockading the valley and three assaults on Kirtipur. Patan fell the same year and Bhaktapur in 1769. Kathmandu became the capital of a unified Nepal. Under the Rana prime ministers, from 1846 to 1951, white neoclassical palaces rose beside the brick cities, and several, such as the old Rana palaces at Lazimpat and Durbar Marg, are hotels today.
Through all of it, Newar life ran on guthis: trusts that own land and fund a festival, a temple, a cremation, a water spout or a chariot. Many still operate. When the 2015 earthquake struck, it was often guthi members and local craftsmen who sorted the fallen timbers and argued over how each strut should be carved again. The valley you visit is the result of that care, and it is still being repaired.
