Salt, kings and the valleys beyond the Himalaya
For centuries the Kali Gandaki was a trade road. Caravans of yaks, mules and sheep carried salt and wool south from Tibet and brought grain, rice and cloth north from the Nepal hills, and Mustang's villages lived by taxing, storing and moving those loads. Around 1380 a ruler named Ame Pal founded the kingdom of Lo and its walled capital, Lo Manthang. His successors built the great gompas of Thubchen and Jampa in the 15th century and held Lo as a Tibetan-speaking kingdom, later a vassal of the Gorkha state.
Further south, the Thakali of the Thak Khola made the salt trade their business. From the late 19th century until about the late 1920s Thakali merchant families held the government customs contract for the trade, and Tukuche grew into the chief trading post, with large courtyard houses that still stand. When the trade with Tibet faded after 1959, many Thakali families moved south and became hoteliers and traders across Nepal, which is why Thakali food is now served in every Nepali town.
The 20th century closed and then opened the north. After 1959 Tibetan resistance fighters based themselves in Upper Mustang until they were disarmed in 1974, and the area stayed off limits to foreigners until 1992. Lo's king kept a ceremonial role until Nepal became a republic in 2008. Dolpo stayed remote: in 1973 Peter Matthiessen and the biologist George Schaller walked to Shey Gompa to study blue sheep, a journey Matthiessen told in The Snow Leopard.
Today the road up the Kali Gandaki reaches Lo Manthang and the Tibetan border at Korala, jeeps carry pilgrims to Muktinath in an hour from Jomsom, and lodges in Upper Mustang have private bathrooms. Dolpo has changed far less; a road reaches Dunai, but Phoksundo and the Tarap valley are still days on foot. Both regions face the same questions: how to keep young people at home, how to farm with less snow and more floods, and how to welcome visitors without losing the old life.
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