The engagements that drew and redrew Nepal’s borders — from Prithvi Narayan Shah’s unification campaign through the Anglo-Nepalese War that fixed the country’s modern frontiers.
34 of 34 battles
Gorkha vs. Kantipur's garrison at Nuwakot
Gorkha victory
Prithvi Narayan Shah's first major conquest beyond Gorkha itself, seizing the fort that commanded the trade route into the Kathmandu Valley. An earlier Gorkhali attempt on Nuwakot in his father's reign had failed badly; the assault of 26 September 1744, planned with Kalu Pande and Dal Mardan Shah, carried the town in a few days.
View Nuwakot in 1744 CE →Gorkha vs. Belkot
Gorkha victory
Fought within days of Nuwakot, this action secured the ridge east of the Trishuli and with it Gorkha's hold on the whole Nuwakot basin. Jayanta Rana, the Kantipur commander who had once served Gorkha, was captured and executed with a cruelty the chronicles do not soften — he was flayed alive on Prithvi Narayan Shah's order.
View Nuwakot in 1744 CE →Gorkha vs. Kirtipur and the Kathmandu Valley kingdoms
Gorkha defeat
The Gorkhali assault on the walled hill town broke on the plain of Tyanglaphant, and Kalu Pande — Prithvi Narayan Shah's chief kaji and closest adviser — was killed. The king himself escaped into the hills; it was the worst reverse of the unification campaign.
View Kathmandu in 1757 CE →Gorkha vs. the Sen Kingdom of Makwanpur
Gorkha victory
An eight-hour fight for the hill fort on 21 August 1762 ended Sen rule at Makwanpur and gave Gorkha the road between the Tarai and the Kathmandu Valley. King Digbandhan Sen fled east to Hariharpur.
View Makawanpur in 1762 CE →Gorkha vs. the remnant Makwanpur court
Gorkha victory
Gorkhali troops stormed Hariharpurgadhi in October 1762, taking the fort and Digbandhan Sen's household. The king and his minister escaped into Company territory in India, where they went looking for an ally.
View Sindhuli in 1762 CE →Gorkha vs. the Nawab of Bengal's army
Gorkha victory
Mir Qasim, the deposed Nawab of Bengal, sent about 3,500 men under his general Gurgin Khan to restore Digbandhan Sen and reopen the hill trade. The force was beaten at Makwanpur in January 1763 — the first time Gorkhali troops defeated an army from the plains equipped with modern muskets and field guns.
View Makawanpur in 1763 CE →Gorkha vs. Kirtipur
Gorkha defeat
A second assault, this one led by the king's younger brother Surapratap Shah, was again driven off with stones and arrows from the walls. Surapratap lost an eye to an arrow — an injury Nepali chronicles record as the reason the blockade replaced the storming party.
View Kathmandu in 1764 CE →Gorkha vs. Kirtipur
Gorkha victory
Years of blockade left the town without water, and in March 1766 a Kirtipur noble opened a gate to the Gorkhalis, who had promised the inhabitants their lives. Prithvi Narayan Shah then ordered the noses and lips cut from the town's men — an episode reported by the Capuchin missionaries then in the valley and repeated in Nepali sources, though its extent has been argued over ever since. Some accounts date the fall to 1767.
View Kathmandu in 1766 CE →Gorkha vs. the British East India Company
Gorkha victory
Jaya Prakash Malla's appeal to Calcutta brought Captain George Kinloch north from Patna with some 2,400 men to break the Gorkhali blockade of the valley. Ambushed in the wooded gorge below Sindhuli Gadhi in the autumn of 1767, short of supplies and racked by fever, the expedition fell apart and Kinloch withdrew — the first British force ever turned back by Nepal.
View Sindhuli in 1767 CE →Gorkha vs. the Malla Kingdom of Kathmandu
Gorkha victory
Gorkha forces entered Kathmandu on 25 September 1768 during the Indra Jatra festival, when the city was crowded and its defenses relaxed. Jaya Prakash Malla escaped to Patan and then to Bhaktapur; the date is still marked as the founding of unified Nepal.
View Kathmandu in 1768 CE →Gorkha vs. the Malla Kingdom of Patan (Lalitpur)
Gorkha victory
Patan fell within weeks of Kathmandu, its ruling Pradhan nobles having been offered terms that split them from their king. Tej Narsingh Malla fled to Bhaktapur, and the nobles who had come over were later seized and executed at Teku.
View Lalitpur in 1768 CE →Gorkha vs. the Malla Kingdom of Bhaktapur
Gorkha victory
The last Malla court, sheltering all three deposed kings, was taken in November 1769 after a siege. Ranajit Malla was allowed to leave for Kashi; his departure closed six centuries of Malla rule in the valley.
View Bhaktapur in 1769 CE →Gorkha vs. the Sen Kingdom of Vijayapur
Gorkha victory
Gorkhali troops under Abhiman Singh Basnyat crossed the Koshi and took Vijayapur in July 1774, two years after Chaudandi had fallen without a fight. The Sen court fled to Sikkim, and the eastern hills and Tarai passed to Kathmandu.
View on the 1774 CE map →Gorkha vs. the Limbu chiefs of Limbuwan
Negotiated submission
The advance beyond the Arun met sustained resistance from the Limbu chiefs around Chainpur and the Tamor, and was settled by agreement rather than conquest. The Lal Mohar of 1774 accepted Gorkhali sovereignty while confirming the chiefs' kipat land rights and customary law — terms that held, in eroding form, into the twentieth century.
View Taplejung in 1774 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. Tibet
Nepalese victory
A quarrel over debased coinage and the salt trade sent Gorkhali columns through the Kuti and Kerung passes onto the Tibetan plateau. The campaign ended in the 1789 Treaty of Kerung, under which Tibet returned the occupied districts and agreed to pay Kathmandu an annual sum.
View on the 1788 CE map →Kingdom of Nepal vs. the Chand Kingdom of Kumaon
Nepalese victory
Bahadur Shah's western armies crossed the Mahakali and reached Almora in under two months against a kingdom already broken by faction. Mahendra Chand fled, ending Chand rule, and Kumaon stayed under Kathmandu for twenty-four years.
View Kumaon in 1790 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. Tibet
Nepalese victory, with grave consequences
When Tibet stopped paying, Damodar Pande marched on Digarcha (Shigatse) and plundered the Tashilhunpo monastery, while Abhiman Singh Basnyat retook Kerung. The looting of Tibet's second-holiest seat gave the Qing court the reason it needed to intervene.
View on the 1791 CE map →Kingdom of Nepal vs. Qing China
Nepalese defeat, negotiated peace
Fuk'anggan brought a Qing army across Tibet in a matter of weeks, drove the Gorkhalis back through Kerung and pushed to within a few days' march of Kathmandu. He was checked at the Betrawati river below Nuwakot in September 1792, and the Treaty of Betrawati that followed left Nepal's borders intact but bound Kathmandu to send a periodic mission to Beijing.
View Nuwakot in 1792 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. the Kingdom of Garhwal
Nepalese victory
A running battle near Dehradun in May 1804 in which Gorkha forces killed Pradyumna Shah, the last Panwar-dynasty king of Garhwal. Garhwal's annexation carried Nepal's western frontier towards the Sutlej — the greatest extent it would ever reach.
View Garhwal in 1804 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. the Sen Kingdom of Palpa
Annexation without a battle
Palpa, the last hill kingdom to keep a separate court, was taken by arrest rather than assault: King Prithvipal Sen, held at Kathmandu, was killed in the Bhandarkhal purge of 1806 that also made Bhimsen Thapa mukhtiyar. The kingdom was absorbed outright.
View Palpa in 1806 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. British East India Company
Nepalese tactical success, fort abandoned
Balbhadra Kunwar held the hilltop fort above Dehradun from 31 October to 30 November 1814 with about 600 men, including women and boys, against some 3,500 British troops with artillery. Two assaults failed and Major-General Rollo Gillespie was killed leading the first; when the water supply was cut, Balbhadra broke out with about seventy survivors. The British later raised an obelisk on the site to 'our brave adversary Bul Buddur and his gallant men'.
View Garhwal in 1814 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. British East India Company
Nepalese victory
Ranjor Singh Thapa's garrison repelled Major-General Martindell's attack on the fort above Nahan in late December 1814, costing the British over three hundred men in a day. Martindell attempted nothing further for six weeks, and Jaithak was only given up in May 1815, after Malaun.
View on the 1814 CE map →Kingdom of Nepal vs. British East India Company
Nepalese victory
Ujir Singh Thapa, holding the Tinau crossing at Butwal with about 1,200 men, broke Major-General John Sullivan Wood's advance on 6 January 1815 and drove it back into the plains. The victory is still marked in Palpa by the Bhagawati Jatra that Ujir Singh vowed before the fight; some accounts date the battle to 1814.
View Rupandehi in 1815 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. British East India Company
British victory
Colonel Nicolls and Edward Gardner's irregulars carried the heights above Almora on 25 April 1815, and the Gorkhali governor Bam Shah sought terms the next day. The Convention of Almora, signed on 27 April, surrendered the whole of Kumaon — twenty-five years of Nepali rule ended in three days.
View Kumaon in 1815 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. British East India Company
Nepalese defeat
Bhakti Thapa, then about seventy-four, led some two thousand men out of Malaun before dawn on 16 April 1815 against the British stockade on the neighbouring ridge, and was shot dead reaching for a gun position. Ochterlony had the body returned to the Nepalese lines with full honours; the failure of the sortie decided the western campaign.
View Garhwal in 1815 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. British East India Company
British victory
With Deothal lost, his supply line cut and Kumaon gone, Amar Singh Thapa surrendered Malaun to Ochterlony on 15 May 1815 on terms that let his troops march out with their arms. The convention ended Nepalese resistance west of the Kali and opened the way to the Sugauli negotiations.
View on the 1815 CE map →Kingdom of Nepal vs. British East India Company
British victory
Ochterlony forced the Chriya hills in February 1816 and beat the Nepalese army in a day-long fight below Makwanpurgadhi on 28 February, with Hariharpur falling days later. With the road to Kathmandu open, the court ratified the treaty it had refused for a year.
View Makawanpur in 1816 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. British East India Company
British-dictated peace
Signed at Sugauli in December 1815 and ratified on 4 March 1816, the treaty cost Nepal roughly a third of its territory — Kumaon, Garhwal, the Sikkim Tarai and the western lowlands — and imposed a permanent British Resident in Kathmandu. Far-western Tarai land was returned in 1860 for Nepal's help during the Indian Rebellion.
View on the 1816 CE map →Jung Bahadur Kunwar and his brothers vs. the assembled court
Jung Bahadur seizes power
Not a battle but a killing inside the state's own armoury. Summoned to the Kot at Hanuman Dhoka on the night of 14 September 1846 to answer for the murder of the queen's favourite Gagan Singh, some thirty to forty courtiers, officers and guards — the prime minister Fateh Jung Shah among them — were cut down by Jung Bahadur's men. He was made prime minister before the week was out, and his family held the office for the next 104 years.
View Kathmandu in 1846 CE →Kingdom of Nepal vs. Tibet
Inconclusive fighting, negotiated settlement
Jung Bahadur declared war in March 1855 over trade grievances and the treatment of Nepali merchants in Lhasa, sending columns under Bam Bahadur Kunwar and Dhir Shamsher through the Kerung and Kuti passes. Both towns were taken, but altitude, supply and a Tibetan counter-offensive that recovered Kuti stalled the campaign through the winter.
View on the 1855 CE map →Kingdom of Nepal vs. Tibet
Terms favourable to Nepal
Signed at Thapathali on 24 March 1856, the treaty obliged Tibet to pay Nepal ten thousand rupees a year, allowed a Nepali trading agency and a resident vakil in Lhasa, and gave Nepali traders exemption from Tibetan duties. It also committed Nepal to help Tibet if a foreign power attacked it — a clause invoked, unsuccessfully, in 1904.
View Kathmandu in 1856 CE →CPN (Maoist) vs. the Nepal Police
Maoist success
In late September 2000 Maoist fighters overran Dunai, the district headquarters of Dolpa, in a night action lasting several hours — the first district centre they had dared attack. Fourteen policemen were killed, the district administration was wrecked and the bank looted, and the raid marked the insurgency's shift from ambush to set-piece assault.
View Dolpa in 2000 CE →CPN (Maoist) vs. the Royal Nepal Army and police
Maoist success; state of emergency declared
On 23 November 2001 the Maoists broke a four-month ceasefire with a coordinated night attack on the army barracks, police post and administration office at Ghorahi in Dang, killing soldiers and carrying off a large haul of automatic weapons. It was the first assault on an army garrison of the war, and brought the army into the conflict under a state of emergency.
View Dang in 2001 CE →CPN (Maoist) vs. the Royal Nepal Army and police
Heavy casualties on both sides; town retaken
Around 3,000 Maoist fighters assaulted Beni, the district headquarters of Myagdi, late on 20 March 2004 and held much of the town until dawn. Seventeen police, fourteen soldiers and nineteen civilians were killed alongside at least ninety Maoists — one of the largest engagements of the insurgency, and among the last before the fighting gave way to the negotiations of 2006.
View Myagdi in 2004 CE →