Squeezed between two empires, Nepal's history was never only its own. Three relationships that don't fit neatly into the atlas's own timeline of conquest and treaty still shaped it deeply: a Cold War army that operated in secret from Nepali soil, a neighboring kingdom that Gorkha itself once conquered and that no longer exists as a country, and a refugee crisis that filled eastern Nepal's camps for a generation.
Nepal and Tibet’s long relationship of trade and war is covered on Trade & Currency and in the 1961 boundary treaty. Two later chapters sit outside that story entirely.
After the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in 1959 and China consolidated its rule over Tibet, the CIA began covertly arming and funding Khampa resistance fighters of the Chushi Gangdruk movement, using the remote Mustang district of northern Nepal as a base largely beyond Kathmandu’s effective reach. From 1960 the operation grew to some fifteen battalions and several thousand fighters, funded at over two million dollars a year, running raids across the Tibetan border through most of the decade. King Mahendra was privately sympathetic to the Tibetan cause and did little to stop it; his son Birendra, seeking better relations with Beijing after Mahendra’s death in 1972, did not extend the same tolerance. Under Chinese pressure, the Nepali army moved into Mustang and disarmed the last fighters in 1974, ending the CIA’s only sustained ground war against China.
The same 1959 upheaval sent an estimated 20,000 Tibetan refugees across the Himalaya into Nepal over the following two years, most settling in and around Kathmandu's Boudhanath stupa, which grew from a pilgrimage site into the center of a lasting Tibetan exile community. Nepal registered and recognized these refugees for three decades, but stopped in 1989 as it moved toward closer ties with China — new arrivals since then have no formal legal status. Roughly 12,000-13,000 Tibetans still live in Nepal today, most without Nepali citizenship even after two generations born there.
Sikkim is the clearest case of a neighbor Nepal's own expansion helped erase. Accounts differ on exact dates, but from the 1770s, and again during the war with Tibet that ran from 1788 to 1792, Gorkha forces repeatedly invaded Sikkim, occupied large stretches of its western territory, and drove its king into exile in Tibet more than once. Nepali hill migration into Sikkim, encouraged in later decades by Sikkim's own rulers to develop the land, began in earnest during this same period — the root of the Nepali-speaking majority Sikkim still has today.
What the atlas labels “Sikkim Tarai” — the strip Nepal held until 1816, shown on this site as historically Nepali territory — was itself land Sikkim had lost to Gorkha in these same wars, not old Nepali soil. When Nepal ceded it to the British at Sugauli, it wasn’t returning it to Sikkim either: the Treaty of Titalia the following year, 1817, saw the British hand only part of it back to the Sikkimese crown, keeping the rest — the area that became Darjeeling and Kalimpong — for themselves.
Sikkim survived as a British and then Indian protectorate for another century and a half, ruled by its own Chogyals. That ended with a 1975 referendum: with a Nepali-origin majority electorate voting overwhelmingly to abolish the monarchy and join India outright, Sikkim became India's 22nd state on 16 May 1975 — the only Himalayan kingdom in this region to disappear entirely rather than modernize or fracture.
Nepal and Bhutan don't border each other — India's Sikkim and West Bengal sit between them — and the two kingdoms fought no wars and signed no treaties with each other. Their history is still entangled, because of the ethnic Nepali (Lhotshampa) communities who had settled in southern Bhutan since the late nineteenth century, recruited by the Bhutanese state itself to clear and farm the Duars lowlands.
Bhutan’s 1985 Citizenship Act retroactively tightened who counted as a citizen, and a 1988 census reclassified large numbers of longtime Lhotshampa residents as illegal immigrants. Cultural assimilation policies followed — Dzongkha replacing Nepali in schools, a mandatory national dress code — and from 1990 the government began forcing Lhotshampa residents out, often after confiscating their land and property and compelling them to sign “voluntary migration” forms. By the end of 1992 more than 80,000 people were living in UNHCR-run camps in Jhapa and Morang, in eastern Nepal; the total displaced over the crisis exceeded 100,000, roughly a sixth of Bhutan’s entire population at the time.
The refugees lived in those camps for close to two decades while repatriation talks between Nepal and Bhutan went nowhere. From 2007, the United States and seven other countries opened a mass third-country resettlement program, and more than 100,000 people have since rebuilt their lives in the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere — one of the largest resettlement programs UNHCR has run anywhere. It is not fully over: as of 2025, a residual population remains in the last camp at Beldangi, still without resettlement or a path to return.