Gorkha Kingdom

The Gorkha Kingdom was an independent hill kingdom in the central Himalayas, in what is now Nepal. It was founded in 1559 when Dravya Shah, a prince of Lamjung and Kaski, seized control of the area around Gorkha and established his capital at the hilltop fortress of Gorkha Durbar. The kingdom was one of the Chaubisi principalities that emerged from the fragmentation of the Khasa-Malla realm. For much of its early history Gorkha was a small state among rival hill kingdoms, but from the 1730s it began to expand, first under Nara Bhupal Shah and then, from 1743, under his son Prithvi Narayan Shah. The Gorkhalis blockaded the wealthy Newar kingdoms of the Kathmandu Valley and defeated a British East India Company expedition sent to relieve them in 1767. Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur fell between 1768 and 1769. Prithvi Narayan Shah then moved his capital to Kathmandu and renamed the enlarged state the Kingdom of Nepal, which became the basis of modern Nepal. The earlier Gorkha kingdom is remembered as the core from which the unification of Nepal began, and the name Gorkha remains associated with the soldiers known as Gurkhas.