Chaubisi Rajya

The Gandaki states

The hill country of the Gandaki basin was divided among some twenty-four principalities, of which Palpa was the most powerful and Lamjung, Kaski, Tanahun and Gorkha among the others. Their ruling families claimed Rajput descent, as did the Baise houses to the west, and the states were bound together by marriage and by a great deal of low-level war.

Gorkha was among the smaller and poorer of them.

The Gorkha ascendancy

Prithvi Narayan Shah succeeded to Gorkha in 1743 and spent twenty-five years taking the Kathmandu valley — first blockading its trade routes, then reducing the three Malla cities between 1767 and 1769. Having taken the valley he had the resources to absorb everything else, and the Chaubisi states fell in turn; Palpa, the strongest, held out until 1806.

The Gorkha state then expanded east to Sikkim and west across Kumaon and Garhwal to the Sutlej, until it met the East India Company. The Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814–16 ended in the Treaty of Sugauli, which fixed Nepal's present borders and began the recruitment of Nepali soldiers into British service.

The Chaubisi and Baise kingdoms therefore matter as the material from which Nepal was made — some fifty polities compressed into one within a single generation.