Patan Durbar Square

Patan — Lalitpur, the City of Beauty — is the oldest of the valley's three royal cities and holds one of the finest concentrations of Newar architecture in Asia. Its Durbar Square sets a long palace wing against a row of temples, and much of the ensemble is the work of a single visionary king.

That king was Siddhi Narsingh Malla (r. c. 1619–1661). He built the square's signature Krishna Mandir in the 1630s — a shikhara carved entirely from stone, crowned with 21 golden pinnacles and wrapped in friezes of the Mahabharata and Ramayana — along with the elephant-guarded Vishwanath Shiva temple (1627) and, inside the palace, Sundari Chowk with its exquisite sunken royal bath, the Tusha Hiti (1647), whose oval basin is lined with 72 tantric deities. His successor Srinivasa Malla added the Bhimsen Temple (patron of traders, with three gilded façade windows) and rebuilt the Mul Chowk and Taleju shrines after fire. Before the palace kneels King Yoganarendra Malla atop a column (1700), a cobra arched over him and a small brass bird on its hood — by legend the king may yet return while the bird remains. The old palace now houses the Patan Museum, widely rated Nepal's finest. Just north stand the Buddhist Golden Temple (Hiranya Varna Mahavihar, an 11th–12th-century bahal adjacent to the square) and the terracotta-tiled Mahaboudha.

Patan was a rival Malla capital from the valley's division around 1482 until Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha took it in 1768. It remains the centre of Nepal's traditional metalwork and stone carving — the surrounding lanes still full of workshops casting the country's finest bronze — and its biggest festival is the month-long Rato Machhindranath Jatra. The 2015 earthquake collapsed the Char Narayan and Hari Shankar temples; a KVPT-led effort has since restored most of the square using salvaged original material.