Bhaktapur Durbar Square

Brick palaces with carved wooden windows, a gilded gateway, stone temples guarded by animals and multi-roofed pagodas crowd the old royal square of Bhaktapur, once counted the largest and grandest of the three Malla-era palace squares of the Kathmandu Valley. For about four centuries the square was the seat of power in the city: first of the Malla kings of Nepal, then, from the fifteenth century, of the independent Kingdom of Bhaktapur, until the city fell to the Gorkhali forces in 1769.

Much of what survives was shaped by Bhupatindra Malla, who ruled from 1696 to 1722 and whose gilt bronze statue, seated with palms joined in homage to the goddess Taleju, sits on a stone column in front of the palace. The Palace of Fifty-five Windows, completed in 1708 on the site of an older building wrecked by an earthquake in 1681, has kept its facade almost unaltered; a band of 147 small carvings of musical ragas runs along the cornice above its ground floor. Beside it, the gilded Golden Gate, made between 1751 and 1754, leads into the inner courtyards and the shrine of Taleju, the tutelary goddess of the Malla dynasty. A huge bell offered to her by Ranajit Malla, the city's last king, in 1737 still hangs on a stone platform where people gather to watch festival processions. At the western entrance stand the fierce stone figures of Ugrachandi and Ugrabhairava, installed in 1706. A popular tale holds that the king had the sculptor's hands cut off so that he could never make their equal for a rival city, but no record supports it. Nearby are temples in many styles: replicas of the four great Hindu pilgrimage shrines of India, built so that the old and infirm could worship without travelling, the stone Siddhi Lakshmi temple with its stairway of guardian figures, and the Vatsala temples.

The square's history is also one of losses. At its height the palace is said to have had ninety-nine courtyards; today about fifteen remain, mostly those connected with the Taleju shrine. Earthquakes in 1833 and 1934 brought down palaces, temples and a nine-storey palace in the western part of the square, and the earthquake of April 2015 damaged more than a hundred historic monuments, and restoration has continued ever since. Bhaktapur, known in Newar as Khwopa and whose Sanskrit name means "city of devotees", is a predominantly Hindu Newar town in the east of the Kathmandu Valley, and the square forms part of the Kathmandu Valley World Heritage Site inscribed by UNESCO in 1979.

Getting there

The square lies in the old centre of Bhaktapur, about 12 km east of central Kathmandu; the neighbouring town of Madhyapur Thimi is about 4 km away. Tribhuvan International Airport (KTM) is about 7 km away by straight line.