The Khas Malla Kings

Four hundred kilometres west of Kathmandu, while the Valley was still finding its shape, a second and entirely separate kingdom called itself Malla. The Khas Malla ruled the Karnali from Sinja in summer and Dullu in winter, and at their height their writ reached from Kumaon across western Nepal into western Tibet.

Their inscriptions — cut in stone at Sinja, Dullu and across the Karnali — name Krachalla, Ashokchalla and Prithvi Malla, and they are written in Khas bhasha, the direct ancestor of the Nepali language now spoken across the country. That is the dynasty's largest surviving work: not a temple but a tongue.

They are not the Mallas of the durbar squares. Nothing connects the two houses but the title, and the confusion is old enough to be worth stating plainly. The Khas Malla empire fragmented in the late fourteenth century into the Baise principalities, and its western remnant reorganised as the Doti kingdom, which outlasted it by four hundred years.

Far less survives here than in the Valley, and what does is landscape and inscription rather than gilded roof. The sites below are where the kingdom can still be stood in.