The Rana Prime Ministers

For one hundred and five years Nepal was governed not by its kings but by one family's prime ministers. Jung Bahadur Rana took power after the Kot massacre of September 1846, made the premiership hereditary in his own line, and reduced the Shah monarchs to ceremonial figures — an arrangement that outlasted him by three generations and ended only with the revolution of 1950–51.

What they left on the ground is unmistakable and almost entirely un-Newar. Where the Malla courts built in brick, timber and gilded copper, with struts and tiered pagoda roofs, the Ranas built white stuccoed neoclassicism: Corinthian columns, pediments, tall shuttered windows and long symmetrical frontages, executed by Newar craftsmen in local brick and lime. Jung Bahadur's state visit to Britain and France in 1850 is usually credited with setting the taste, and the **Narshingh** family of court architects — Kishore Narshingh above all — turned it into a house style.

The scale was enormous. Singha Durbar, finished for Chandra Shumsher in 1908, was described at the time as the largest private residence in Asia; Bagh Durbar, Lal Durbar, Babar Mahal, Thapathali and Seto Durbar filled the city with others, and the 1934 earthquake and a 1973 fire between them destroyed a great deal of it. Most of what survives is now ministries, army property or schools, which is why the Garden of Dreams matters out of proportion to its size: it is the one Rana-era place in Kathmandu you can simply buy a ticket and walk into.

The record is genuinely mixed and worth stating as such. Chandra Shumsher abolished slavery in Nepal in 1924 and founded Tri-Chandra College; Bir Shumsher built the country's first hospital. The same administrations kept Nepal closed to outsiders, blocked schooling for most of the population, and suppressed religious and political reform — the Theravada revival at Kindo Bahal among them. Both halves are the same century.