Nepal

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Nepal's geography is not an accident of borders so much as a consequence of them. Squeezed between the world's two most populous countries, India to the south and China north across the Himalayan crest, Nepal has spent much of its modern history managing that position rather than escaping it. Prithvi Narayan Shah's unification of the Kathmandu Valley in 1769 built a buffer kingdom that both the British Raj and Qing China had reason to leave alone rather than absorb, and the strategy mostly worked: unlike its neighbors on both sides, Nepal was never formally colonized. That same position now shapes its economy and its trade routes, most of which run south through India rather than north across the mountains, and its diplomacy, which has long balanced goodwill toward both neighbors rather than choosing between them.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Shah dynasty that Prithvi Narayan Shah founded in 1769 did not rule continuously in practice. For over a century, from the mid nineteenth century, the hereditary Rana family held the office of prime minister and the real power of the state while the Shah kings reigned in name only, a system a 1951 revolution finally broke, restoring functioning monarchy under the same dynasty. That restored monarchy lasted only until 2008 in any binding form. A decade long Maoist insurgency, a royal massacre in 2001 that killed King Birendra and much of his family, and a mass pro-democracy movement in 2006 together brought the monarchy to its actual end: on 28 May 2008 a newly elected constituent assembly abolished it outright, declaring Nepal a federal democratic republic and ending its long status as the only Hindu kingdom in the world.