From the Shakya country to the Palpa hills
In the Buddha's time, around the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, this plain was divided between clans. The Shakyas ruled from Kapilavastu, which most scholars place at Tilaurakot; the Koliyas held Devdaha and Ramagrama to the east, across the Rohini river. The two families married into each other: King Suddhodana of the Shakyas married the Koliya sisters Maya and Prajapati. Maya gave birth at Lumbini, between the two towns, on her way home.
Around 249 BCE the emperor Ashoka came here as a pilgrim. At Lumbini he raised a pillar recording that the Buddha was born there; at Niglihawa he recorded enlarging the stupa of an earlier Buddha, Konakamana. Chinese monks followed his trail many centuries later. By then the towns were ruins, and over the following centuries the forest and the malarial Terai swallowed them.
In the 1890s the pillars were found again, at Niglihawa in 1893 and at Lumbini in 1896, the second dig overseen by General Khadga Shumsher Rana, governor of the western hills. In the hills, meanwhile, another history had played out: the Magar principalities, then the Sen kingdom of Palpa, which under Mukunda Sen in the 16th century nearly took the Kathmandu Valley and stayed independent until 1806.
Modern Lumbini began with U Thant's visit in 1967 and Kenzo Tange's master plan, carried out by the Lumbini Development Trust from 1985. UNESCO listed Lumbini in 1997, and Tilaurakot, Ramagrama and the Rishikesh temple at Ridi are on its tentative list. In 2022 Bhairahawa's airport opened as Gautam Buddha International Airport, bringing the Buddha's birthplace within reach of more pilgrims.
