Shah dynasty of Nepal

Unification

Prithvi Narayan Shah, king of the small hill state of Gorkha, conquered the Kathmandu valley between 1767 and 1769 and then the surrounding principalities, creating the state of Nepal. His political testament, the Divya Upadesh, described the country as a yam between two boulders — India and China — and set the policy of guarded independence that Nepal followed thereafter.

Expansion continued until the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814–16, which fixed the borders at roughly their present line and established the Gurkha recruitment relationship with the British.

The Ranas

In 1846 Jung Bahadur Kunwar, later Rana, seized power after the Kot massacre — a night of killing in the palace courtyard that destroyed the rival court factions — and made the office of prime minister hereditary in his family. For the next hundred and five years the Shah kings reigned without ruling, confined to the palace, while the Rana prime ministers governed.

The Rana period kept Nepal isolated and undeveloped, with almost no schools, roads or industry, while the family accumulated great wealth and built Neoclassical palaces in Kathmandu. It ended in 1951 when King Tribhuvan, with Indian support and a popular movement, restored the monarchy's authority.

The end of the monarchy

Multiparty democracy was conceded in 1990 after mass protests. The Maoist insurgency began in 1996 and ran for a decade. In 2001 most of the royal family was killed in the palace by Crown Prince Dipendra, according to the official inquiry; the event is still widely disbelieved in Nepal, and the throne passed to Gyanendra.

Gyanendra's assumption of direct rule in 2005 united the parties and the Maoists against him. The people's movement of 2006 forced him to restore parliament, and in 2008 the constituent assembly abolished the monarchy and declared a federal democratic republic.

With that vote the last reigning Hindu monarchy came to an end — two hundred and thirty-nine years after Prithvi Narayan took Kathmandu, and thirty-three years after Sikkim's chogyal lost his throne.