The hard-working people of the apple village
Marpha's name is often explained as 'mar', hard-working, and 'pha', people, and the village has earned it. Its families, the Marphali, are one of the four groups who call themselves Thakali. Their clans carry the surnames Hirachan, Pannachan, Jwarchan and Lalchan. Like the other Thakali villages of the Kali Gandaki, Marpha prospered from trade along the river, as caravans moved Tibetan salt and wool south and grain and goods north, and its houses were built for a valley where the wind blows every afternoon.
In 1899 the Japanese monk Ekai Kawaguchi came up the Kali Gandaki looking for a way into Tibet, which was closed to foreigners. He spent months in Mustang, studying in Tsarang and then living in Marpha, before slipping across a high pass into Tibet in 1900. He was the first recorded Japanese citizen to travel to Nepal or Tibet, and his book Three Years in Tibet describes the Kali Gandaki villages as they were in the last years of the 19th century.
When the salt trade declined in the mid-20th century, Marpha turned to fruit. A government horticulture farm in the 1960s introduced improved apple varieties suited to the cold, dry climate. Orchards replaced some barley fields, and the village began distilling apple brandy. Today tourism and fruit carry most households. Many younger Marphali live in Pokhara or Kathmandu for school and work, but families return for harvest and for festivals, when the gompa is full and the lane is crowded again.
