Nepal

Nepal, officially the Federal Democratic Republic, is the landlocked Himalayan country between Tibet and India, holding eight of the world's ten highest mountains with Everest above them all, and Kathmandu as its capital and largest city. The Kathmandu Valley had been the seat of the Newar confederacy of Nepal Mandala, rich on the Himalayan Silk Road trade. In the mid-eighteenth century Prithvi Narayan Shah, king of Gorkha, set out to build present Nepal, securing the mountain kingdoms and taking the valley in bloody battle, and the Shah dynasty founded the Kingdom of Nepal in 1768. The kingdom later fell under Rana premiers who allied it with the British Empire, and the Treaty of Sugauli left it a buffer state between China and British India, never colonised. Parliamentary democracy arrived in 1951 but monarchs suspended it twice, in 1960 and 2005, and the civil war of the 1990s ended with a secular republic.