5 The Architects of Xanadu

5

 

 

The Architects of Xanadu

 

It had been a glittering autumn’s day in Kathmandu. The usual layer of smog was gone, unveiling the city’s mountainous backdrop in adamantine clarity: Ganesh to the north-west, the snow pyramid of Langtang Lirung to the north and to the north-east the white diamond of Dorje Lhakpa, all of them seven kilometres or so above sea level and seeming so close I felt I could touch them. From Ratna Park in the middle of town, a place ordinarily cloaked in fumes, I’d even spotted the distant shark’s fin of the world’s highest mountain: Chomolungma.

Older inhabitants must have thought of their youth, when the city was

more often like this, before everything changed. In the span of a generation, from the 1980s onwards, hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over Nepal had moved into the city, drawn by economic necessity, or as refugees from the Maoist insurgency that had plunged the nation into war. Modest Kathmandu had become one of the fastest-growing cities in South Asia. New neighbourhoods of dismal concrete sprang up, turning the valley from green to grey. A city that for much of its history was concerned with ritual pollution became swamped with the real thing: plastics, fumes and filthy rivers.

These days, tourists are often in a rush to escape Kathmandu. In the

popular imagination, the Himalaya are a place for adventure, of wild new horizons, not urban sprawl. And yet even now the valley’s ancient cities remain among the most elegant and richly complex achievements in human history, not just for the breathtaking quality of their architecture and decorative arts, but for the ways of living that evolved alongside the built environment. Despite the impacts of mass production and global communication, these exquisite urban centres remain so culturally compelling and intricate that the city itself becomes a narcotic. You can lose yourself here, following the arc of festivals as the weeks tick by, finding something new and beautiful to ponder on every walk through the narrow streets. A place where, as the scholar Giuseppe Tucci put it, ‘all the terror, the anguish and the hope of India are expressed with a frankness that approaches exultation’.

Now it was dusk, and light on the distant snows was darkening from pink

to indigo. Among the temples and palaces of Patan, south of the Bagmati river, a large crowd was gathered around a dabali, a raised platform, where a dancer in a white lion-mask was menacing a stout fellow wearing a silver crown and armed with what looked like a papier-mâché mace. Red scraps of cloth tied at the lion’s wrists and elbows streamed from his arms as he whirled around the dais, making him a blur of extravagant fabric, the long mane that reached down to the small of his back catching the light from braziers at all four corners of the stage. Every so often the lion performed a stunt, leaping into the air and gathering his legs underneath him, or spinning round nimbly, or else pawing the air with imaginary claws, and every time he did so the children watching shrieked with excitement, their squeals competing with the raucous noise of clashing cymbals and parping trumpets. As the lion skipped and prowled, the king waggled his cudgel and backed away, legs wide apart, feet turned out, weighed down with garlands of marigolds, awaiting his fate.

This was the Kartik Naach, or Kartik dances, Kartik being the month in

the Hindu calendar when they’re held. The story is drawn from the Puranas and tells how Narasimha, an avatar of Vishnu whose name translates as ‘man-lion’, overcomes the asura or demon, Hiranyakashipu, who has been persecuting his followers. Hiranyakashipu is angry because an avatar of Vishnu has killed his brother. He wants revenge. Hiranyakashipu goes through great austerities so Brahma will protect him with magical powers: no man or animal can harm him. Yet even as he wages war, he can’t dissuade his own son, the saintly Prahlada, from his devotion to Vishnu. So Hiranyakashipu resolves to have him killed in a sequence of outlandish assassination attempts. Prahlada’s virtue saves him every time. Hiranyakashipu then mocks his son. Pointing to a pillar of stone, he asks if Vishnu exists even in this lump of rock. But when he hits the pillar with his mace, Narasimha emerges and because he is half man and half animal, neither wholly one nor the other, the man-lion poses a fatal threat. In the story, Narasimha eviscerates Hiranyakashipu. As the dance reached this climax in the story, Narasimha simply touched the demon on the chest, who fainted dead away, born aloft like a crowd-surfing rock star while spectators held up their smartphones to share the triumph of good over evil on social media.

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There are far older and more famous festivals in the Kathmandu valley.

The chariot procession that each spring carries the god Bunga Dyah, giver of rain, around the streets of Patan under the auspicious gaze of Patan’s Kumari, or living goddess, is well over a thousand years old and means a great deal more to the original Newari population of the city. (Sacred to Buddhists and Hindus, Bunga Dyah is for some synonymous with Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion known in Tibet as Chenrezig.) The Kartik dances on the other hand began during the reign of Siddhi Narasimha Malla, king of Patan, in the mid seventeenth century, a few years before the first Europeans reached the city. Across the border in Tibet, the Guge kingdom was in its final death spiral; in Lhasa the fifth Dalai Lama and his powerful proxy Sonam Rabten were exerting control for the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism after decades of sectarian and regional conflict. This was good news for the Malla kings who ruled the Kathmandu valley: during the rule of the ‘Great Fifth’, as the Dalai Lama became known, they were given the job of minting Tibet’s currency, a lucrative industry that bankrolled the chief and hugely expensive preoccupation of Kathmandu’s Malla kings: competition with each other, often expressed in the extravagance of their architecture, and their decorative and performance arts.

Although there were a thousand years between the deep-rooted people’s

festival for Bunga Dyah and the courtly theatre of the Kartik dances, both were built on Kathmandu’s unique collection of advantages, beginning with its propitious location, nestling in mountains at 1,400 metres, and its generous climate. The month of Kartik runs from late October to late November. The weather is fine but not yet too cold. It’s an auspicious month, the start of the wedding season, right after the hugely popular festival of Dasain. In mythology, the eleventh day of Kartik is when Vishnu awakes from his four-month yogic doze to marry his bride Laksmi. There’s no better time to tie the knot.

As Kartik wears on, the temperature drops and you’re grateful at night

for a fire. Until the jungles of northern India were cleared, the cold temperatures also put an end to the deadly malaria season. Known as aul in Nepal, malaria didn’t just affect the plains. As the British resident Brian Hodgson wrote in the mid nineteenth century: ‘No elevation short of 3,000 to 4,000 feet above the sea suffices to rid the atmosphere of the low Himalaya from malaria.’ Villagers would build their farmhouses above this line so they could escape the mosquitos, walking down to their lower fields in the morning. Climate change seems to be raising the mosquito’s ceiling, creating new problems in remote villages. There’s an argument that Nepal’s history has been shaped as much by the mosquito as by any great king.

The valley’s original inhabitants, arriving in the first millennium bce, a

shadowy group called the Kirata who spoke a Tibeto-Burmese language from which Newari developed, must have pinched themselves at their good fortune: a largely flat valley with some of the most fertile soil in the region and above the malaria line. The valley’s location had another benefit. It was conveniently close to the high mountains and developing trade routes into Tibet. Merchants and pilgrims would wait until the cold season to cross the malaria-infested jungle. By then it was also winter in the high mountains, where snowfall and low temperatures posed a different kind of fatal hazard. So they would wait for spring in the Kathmandu valley, where there was sufficient food, for the passes to clear and Tibetan traders to come down from the plateau, or else to continue their own journey. The seventh-century traveller and Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who travelled to Indian Buddhist sites seeking inspiration, was among the first to record how trade funded the valley’s complex religious life, with Buddhist and Hindu institutions coexisting side by side.

Trade was already well established by the time the first literate dynasty

established itself in Kathmandu, early in the fifth century. The Licchavi were an offshoot of a long-established polity based at the ancient city of Vaishali, across the Ganges from Patna in north-east India. This was the dynasty that Songtsen Gampo had known as a vassal state to the emergent Tibetan Empire. The Licchavi period coincided with the Gupta Empire in India, centuries of immense artistic achievement, which reached their apogee in Kathmandu from the late fifth to early seventh centuries: stone sculpture from this period remains unsurpassed. The Licchavi founded many of Kathmandu’s most sacred temples on sites that were already revered: the great Buddhist stupa at Swayambhu, the Shaivite Pashupatinath beside the Bagmati river, and Changu Narayan, a temple to Vishnu with the valley’s oldest inscription, dating from the fifth century. At Budhanilakantha, on the northern rim of the Kathmandu valley, is a colossal seventh-century statue of Vishnu in his incarnation as Narayan: asleep in a sunken pond, resting on the endless loops of a naga, or snake spirit, in the shape of a cobra whose hooded heads shade him as he sleeps. The pond represents the primordial cosmic ocean. When he awakes, Vishnu will take his place in heaven in a universe created by Brahma, himself born from a lotus that grew from Vishnu’s navel as he slept. The god Shiva provides the predominant Hindu narrative strand in the Himalaya, and his incarnations dominate the Kathmandu valley, but Vishnu’s royal influence also stretches back deep into the city’s past; as the story of the Kartik dances shows, Vishnu was central to the Malla kings. Those who replaced them, the now defunct Shah dynasty, last kings of Nepal, regarded themselves as incarnations of Vishnu.

When the Buddhist Pala dynasty emerged in the late eighth century, the

Licchavis still controlled the valley but were beginning their decline. The rulers that followed had links to the Pala Empire and the Buddhist universities – Nalanda, Vikramasila and Odantapuri – in what is now the Indian state of Bihar. (The name ‘Bihar’ derives from the Sanskrit and Pali term vihara, literally ‘abode’ but meaning monastery.) From this world the tantric influences that are the hallmark of Newari culture emerged; the teacher Atisa, who as we saw in the last chapter brought this late Indian Buddhist renaissance to Tibet, was ordained at Nalanda and received his most important teaching at Vikramasila. Under the Pala, new artistic traditions developed, stunning images in bronze and gold, a cultural explosion that filled Kathmandu with tantric gurus, drawing students from Tibet. The artisans were monks themselves, and from the tenth century, as Tibet took up the rage for tantric Buddhism, their work was in high demand there as well. Around the time of the Norman Conquest in England, something extraordinary happened in the heart of the Himalaya, a combination of bold, dangerous philosophy and exquisite art. As the writer and long-time resident of Kathmandu Thomas Bell put it: ‘The rise of tantrism in medieval Kathmandu turned the city into a magical garden.’ And the ideas and psychological insights that grew in that Indian garden were soon transplanted to the high plateau of Tibet beyond the Himalaya.

It was a final flourish from Indian Buddhism. The Pala Empire in Bengal,

already in decline in western India during the mid ninth century, found itself under increasing pressure from a resurgent Hinduism and the kingdoms that supported it. Islam had displaced Buddhism from Afghanistan and Pakistan by the early eleventh century, although Buddhism hung on in Kashmir until the fourteenth. Its large monastic institutions grew distant from the lay population, weakening their connection to ordinary people. To their eyes, tantric Buddhism looked pretty much the same as the Hindu version. Then, in around 1193, the Persian warlord Ikhtiyar al-Din Muhammad Khalji swept across Bihar and this gradual decline became annihilation. Monks and nuns were put to the sword, gold icons looted and religious books burned. Buddhism was essentially scraped off northern India, its followers scattered, many of them taking refuge at Kathmandu. (Ikhtiyar al-Din soon overreached himself attempting to invade Tibet and lost his army; he was assassinated not long after.)

This culture, swept away on the tide of history from the very places

where Buddha had preached, now found refuge in the mountains, where it not only survived but enjoyed a period of artistic and architectural achievement. Kathmandu’s valley in the mountains was strategic enough to get rich but obscure enough to escape fatal predation as successive waves of invaders swept across the plains of India. In this way, Nepal, meaning the valley of Kathmandu, held a peculiarly important position in Asian history, a crossroads where South, Central and East Asian religious and artistic influences met, coalesced and survived, a living reminder of a half-forgotten world, the key to a secret history that would remain hidden from Europeans even after they discovered the city.

The cultural brilliance of medieval Kathmandu was not lost on the rest of

Asia, however. Soon after its emergence, it would find new expression in the court of a new force that had torn through all of Asia and into Europe: the Mongols.

Just as Buddhism, fading from India, flourished in Kathmandu, so it also gained new impetus in Tibet. In the west, we have seen, the Guge kingdom had sponsored a Buddhist cultural revival, drawing from Kashmiri influences and teachers like Atisa. Central Tibet, meanwhile, became a spiritual laboratory for tantric practices from northern India and the Pala Empire, via trade routes that passed through the Kathmandu valley. A famous example of a tantric ‘wild one’ prompting an entire lineage is Marpa Lotsawa, Marpa the translator, born into a landowning Tibetan family but too restless to settle to life as a farmer. He travelled to Nalanda in India to study with the great teacher Naropa (who in turn had studied with Tilopa) and brought home new tantric mantras that he would practise on behalf of the laity in return for gold, which in turn funded return trips to India for more study. Gold mining was intense in eleventh century Tibet and gold fuelled the dissemination of Buddhism, trickling south through Kathmandu to India as spiritual energy flowed the other way. Marpa’s student was the charismatic Milarepa, and their lineage became the Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism, Kagyu meaning ‘whispered transmission’.

Some feared that the huge popular success of tantric teachings and their

wilder interpretations threatened to corrupt their meaning into little more than magical spells used for personal gain. Konchok Gyalpo was one such, born into the aristocratic Khon family. A contemporary of Milarepa, he founded a new Buddhist centre at Sakya, thirteen kilometres south-west of Shigatse in southern Tibet, beginning another Tibetan Buddhist lineage that survives today, the third of the four great schools of Tibetan Buddhism and the only one whose spiritual leader is drawn from within the same family. The Sakya would prosper in the fragmented world of Tibet in the early part of the second millennium, but largely through the intervention of foreign powers.

It was another version of Tibetan Buddhism, however, that would intially

influence the Mongols, one that sprang from the Tangut people. Known to themselves and Tibetans as the Minyak, they had been pushed out of the rolling grasslands of north-eastern Tibet during the time of the Tibetan Empire to the Ordos region near the Yellow river. Now, in the eleventh century, they were building their own centre of power and moved back into Tibet, taking the Tibetan plateau city of Xining. As the Tibetan emperors had done, they translated Buddhist scriptures into their own language. In doing so they developed a new kind of relationship with Tibetan teachers, particularly from the Kagyu lineage, who travelled to the powerful Tangut court. In 1227, the Mongols’ devastating forces swept down and utterly destroyed the Tangut capital Xingqing. Despite this, they saw value in continuing the ruler-priest relationship the Tangut had pioneered between themselves and Tibetan monks, as it offered an effective way to control the high and exposed Tibetan plateau at arm’s length, without committing resources that might be used more profitably elsewhere.

By the mid thirteenth century, Tibet had largely been absorbed into the

Mongol Empire under Mongke Khan, the fourth khagan, or ‘emperor’, beginning a period of Mongol influence in Tibet that would last until the eighteenth century. Mongke gave his patronage to the Kagyu lineage, although the leader of the empire’s Buddhists came from Kashmir. But the Sakya lineage also had influence among some of the Mongol elite and in 1258, Kublai Khan, under the influence of his wife Chabi, acknowledged Drogon Chogyal Phagpa, leader of the Sakya-pa, as his tantric guru, essentially converting to Tibetan Buddhism. Mongke died in 1259 and, after a civil war with their younger brother Ariq Boke, Kublai was elected the fifth khagan in May 1260. At the end of that year Phagpa became Kublai’s kuoshi, a kind of state religious instructor, cementing the idea of a ruler– priest relationship between Mongols and Tibetans, a conscious attempt by Kublai to move away from the Mongol reputation as nomadic raiders. A Tibetan would now lead the empire’s Buddhists, or at least that portion that Kublai retained in the new Yuan dynasty he formally proclaimed in 1271, and which ruled China and its wider region for the next century. Phagpa and the Sakya also became the controlling power in Tibet, to the disadvantage of the Kagyu, although they continued to have support from the Mongol Il-Khanate in the west, ruled by Hulagu, another of Kublai’s brothers.

To cement this new synthesis of religious and political power, Kublai

commissioned a stupa dedicated to Phagpa’s predecessor and uncle, the great Buddhist scholar Sakya Pandita. A previous Mongol lord, Godan, had tried to use Sakya Pandita as a proxy to control all the Tibetans, an effort that was largely ignored. Now, thanks to Kublai, the Sakya really were in charge. To build the stupa, Phagpa needed artisans capable of something exceptional to symbolise this new relationship with the Mongols. Such skills were absent from Tibet and so he looked across the Himalaya. India had been the wellspring of Buddhism in Tibet from the time of the emperors almost five hundred years earlier, but the rise of Islam had largely extinguished that source. The great university at Nalanda, where Marpa had studied tantric Buddhism, had been razed to the ground. So Phagpa looked to the Kathmandu valley, where Buddhism and its art continued to flourish, and its famous Newari craftsmen, who had made such an influential cultural impact during the era of the tsenpo emperors, when craftsmen from the Kathmandu valley had helped adorn the Jokhang temple in Lhasa.

A well-known legend tells how Phagpa sent a request to Jayabhima Deva

Malla, among the first of the Malla dynasty that ruled the valley from the early thirteenth century. (‘Malla’ means wrestler. A dynasty of that name in north-eastern India features in the Mahabharata. The Mallas of the Kathmandu valley weren’t the only ones to borrow that mythical prestige, which can be confusing.) Phagpa wanted a hundred artisans to build the Khagan’s stupa. He clearly didn’t need that many men for just one stupa; this was a wholesale acquisition of the Himalayan artistic tradition that gave Tibetan Buddhism its distinctive visual imagery. Chinese artists didn’t have the knowledge to produce the Tibetan Buddhist iconography Phagpa required, the myriad tantric deities in all their manifestations. In hiring artisans from Kathmandu, Phagpa was bringing a kind of iconographic legitimacy to the new relationship between the Sakya lineage and Kublai Khan.

As it happened, the king in Kathmandu could only muster eighty artisans.

The earthquake of 1255, estimated to have killed thirty thousand people, a third of the valley’s population, must have had a devastating impact on the city, limiting the skilled labour Jayabhima Deva had to spare, even for a Mongol emperor. Meeting the workers personally before they left for Tibet, the king asked them to choose one of their number as leader. The only one prepared to take on the responsibility was a young man still in his mid teens, an artist of genius called Arniko. He admitted his youth but claimed he was ‘old in mind’. It was the start of a journey that would lift him to the highest levels of Kublai’s court and earn him a fortune. It was Arniko who would be responsible for the spiritual iconography that gave the Yuan court its religious authority.

Tradition holds that Arniko was born in the city of Patan, perhaps

because it enjoyed the greatest artistic reputation, but the little we know about him comes from the chronicles of the Yuan dynasty where he made his name, rather than from his birthplace. Even his name is debated: in China it was written as Anige. The best source we have is his epigraph, written by a Chinese court official called Cheng Jufu. Yuan chroniclers claimed he came from royal stock, but since he married a Mongol princess, that was more likely a piece of expeditious social retrofitting. Rather like the hagiographies of Buddhist saints, the stories around Arniko are of a preternaturally gifted and serious-minded child. The epigraph tells us that even as a three-year-old, Arniko would be looking around the temple during religious ceremonies and passing judgment on the architecture. At school, he memorised complex sutras on the arts at one sitting, like Mozart absorbing every aspect of music he’d never heard before. By the time he left for Tibet he was an expert in painting, carving and casting images. Starting in 1861, he led a group of Newari artisans in building a golden stupa that Kublai commissioned for the Sakya monastery in central Tibet, a complex that was then rapidly evolving as Sakya power within Tibet grew. The stupa was built in the monastery’s main hall, and although it no longer exists, the legacy of Arniko’s Newari artisans can be traced in stunning murals at Shalu monastery neaer Shigatse, the languid, elliptical shapes an echo of the last Pala Empire on the roof of the world.

Arniko did such a good job that Phagpa insisted he visit Kublai Khan’s

capital Dadu (modern Beijing) at the end of 1262. His introduction to Kublai was recorded. The Khagan looked at him for a while before asking if he was afraid ‘to come to the big country?’ Arniko’s reply was politically shrewd for a teenager.

The sage regards people in all directions as his sons. When a son comes to his father, what is there to fear?

—Why do you come?

—My family has been living in the west for generations. I took the imperial edict to build the stupa in Tibet for two years. I saw constant wars, and wish your majesty could pacify there. I come for sentient beings.

The emperor tested the young Newari with a challenge: to restore a damaged bronze statue the court’s artists had judged beyond repair, a task he eventually accomplished although it took three years. Kublai was delighted and over the next decade Arniko worked his way up to become supervisor for all classes of artisans, thousands of them, responsible for a huge expansion of state-sponsored art that Kublai eventually curtailed because it was so expensive. Arniko was responsible for the religious imagery, imperial portraits and other court projects, seals and insignia, a kind of branding that defined the regime’s character, its strong links between the Sakya preceptor and the khagan’s sovereignty. The Mongol lords liked the golden images of Buddha, but they left the complex philosophy to their Tibetan priests. When Kublai went to war, Phagpa gave his blessing and Arniko created a mural featuring the fierce tantric protector deity Mahakala to make the enterprise auspicious.

Arniko’s most famous achievement was the White Stupa in Beijing,

which still stands, having been singled out for protection by Communist China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, some years before the Cultural Revolution. It is a curious combination of Pala, Newari and Chinese styles, a consequence perhaps of its architect’s cosmopolitan life. Around it he designed a temple so vast it took fifty-eight thousand trees to complete, the most expensive building project of Kublai’s reign but destroyed in a fire in 1368. Arniko is also associated with the Sarira Pagoda, another white stupa fifty-two metres high, at the Buddhist centre of Wutaishan in Shanxi province, sacred home of the bodhisattva Manjushri, completed in 1301 some years after Kublai’s death. By then Arniko had already built another commission at Wutaishan for Kublai’s successor Temur: the Wangsheng Youguosi, or Temple of Myriad Saints Safeguarding the State, which proved to be one of the most expensive and complicated buildings the Yuan dynasy built and is sadly no longer extant. Controversial at court, the project nevertheless brought its Newari architect huge riches. Kublai had rewarded him with jade and gold belts, dozens of expensive robes, fur coats and hats, chariots and horses; for this latest triumph Temur’s mother rewarded him with almost half a ton of silver. Kublai made sure Arniko’s Newari wife was brought from Kathmandu and he married several times more, including his Mongolian princess. He took on a Chinese soubriquet, Xixuan, meaning ‘western studio’, a reference to his house in western Dadu as well as his distant origins and artistic school. He died in 1306 a wealthy man with huge landholdings and thousands of serfs, not the first and certainly not the last migrant from Nepal hoping to exploit his talents in a foreign land.

When Kublai died, Arniko produced portraits of his old patron and his

favourite wife Chabi, who had died a few years earlier. She had been a great supporter of the Mongol court’s Tibetan influence but later, as some believe, converted to Christianity like her mother-in-law. Always cosmopolitan, she was a restraining influence on Kublai, mindful of maintaining respectful relations with the khagan’s mostly Chinese subjects. The art historian Anning Jing has argued that these portraits are those now hanging in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, showing Kublai Khan in his more corpulent middle years and Chabi in her remarkably tall Mongolian headdress, known in Chinese as a gugu. The technique expressed in these paintings suggests an artist trained in the Himalaya, not China.

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Echoes of Arniko’s creative world resonated in Europe, most famously in The Travels of Marco Polo, which included a description of Shangdu, the summer palace of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan; Arniko was not its chief architect, but he had made his contribution. ‘There is at this place a very fine marble palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such exquisite art that you regard them with delight and astonishment.’ Polo’s book was for centuries one of the few available sources on Central Asia. The Elizabethan travel writer Samuel Purchas drew on it for his Purchas, his Pilgrimage: a geo-religious encyclopaedia he collated and published in 1613. Purchas himself never travelled more than three hundred or so kilometres from his native Essex, taking inspiration instead from the seafarers he met there. He also inherited the papers of Richard Hakluyt, chaplain to Robert Cecil, secretary of state to Elizabeth I and James I. Hakluyt wrote widely on exploration and voyages of discovery, and was an adviser to the East India Company, founded in 1600.

It was Purchas’ book that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had open on his chest

when he fell into a vision-filled sleep at his rented cottage in the Somerset village of Nether Stowey, having taken grains of opium to alleviate a bout of dysentery. Coleridge understood very well the impact opium had on his imagination. ‘I should much wish,’ he wrote in a letter to Robert Southey during that period, ‘like the Indian Vishna, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos, & wake once in a million years for a few minutes – just to know I was going to sleep a million years more.’

Purchas’ version of Polo’s story opens with the phrase: ‘In Xamdu did

Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs … ’ The Khan, Purchas wrote, spent his summers in a ‘sumptuous house of pleasure’ that could be dismantled and moved around: deluxe nomadism. Coleridge borrowed the first sentence, added an extra syllable to give ‘Xanadu’, turned the ‘house of pleasure’ into a ‘stately pleasure dome’ and swapped the prosaic ‘build’ for ‘decree’: much more the style of a Mongol Khan. The poem ‘Kubla Khan’ is not of course about the Mongols: it’s about the human imagination in the act of creation, Coleridge sculpting a dream and offering it to the reader. He did have ideas about the real Kublai Khan, describing him in a letter as ‘the greatest Prince in Peoples, Cities & Kingdoms that ever was in the World’. But for Coleridge Kublai was simply the most powerful and exotic leader he could imagine, an Oriental barbarian beyond even the remotest outcasts of the Bible. European Romanticism fed on such stories of exotic fantasy and lost utopias, and colonial conquest made ‘the Orient’ a rich vein of material. Such imaginings had a pervasive influence on European perspectives of the East. Coleridge does at least allow Kublai Khan a sensuous creativity at odds with his barbarian reputation, reflecting the Mongol’s patronage of the arts and his intellectual curiosity. And somewhere in that world view, unknown to Purchas or Coleridge, were cultural flavours brought across the Himalaya from Kathmandu.

The first Europeans to visit the city were seventeenth century Jesuit

missionaries, among them Johann Grueber, born in the Austrian city of Linz in 1623. Having served for several years as a mathematics assistant at the Qing imperial court, he was summoned back to Rome in 1661. The sea route was closed, thanks to a hostile Dutch navy, so with his Belgian companion Albert d’Orville, Grueber made a daring journey from Beijing to Goa in south-western India through Tibet and Nepal. Setting out he travelled first west to Xining, where he joined a merchant’s caravan to Lhasa, passing along the northern shore of the vast lake of Kokonor before turning south-west, indulging his passion for drawing as he went. Grueber was the first European to reach Lhasa, where he spent a month or so waiting for another merchant’s caravan to cross the Himalaya. While he waited, he sketched the locals and tried to meet the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, the Great Fifth. As a Jesuit unwilling to kneel before an idolater, the audience was denied. Grueber sketched him anyway, from a portrait hung at the gate of the Dalai Lama’s new palace, which he called the ‘Burg Beitala’: known to us as the Potala.

Grueber’s onward journey south to Kathmandu took him towards

Shigatse and the monastery of Tashilhunpo, seat of another great Buddhist lineage, the Panchen Lamas. He was not the first Jesuit to visit. The Portuguese João Cabral, who entered Tibet from Bengal with Estêvão Cacella, escaped imprisonment in Bhutan and fled to Shigatse in 1628.

There he sought permission from the ‘petty kings’ to the south of the Himalaya to enter Nepal. Sadly, Cabral’s letter to his superiors in Rome about his experiences in Kathmandu is lost, so Grueber’s accounts are the first European perspective we have on the city. Their experiences would later feed into a monumental effort to collate knowledge about China and its environs by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, among the most famous European intellectuals of his day. Thus it was a Jesuit perspective that coloured Europe’s first view of the Himalaya’s greatest city.

Grueber and d’Orville reached the Kathmandu valley early in 1662.

Before them was a territory half the size of New York City containing three competing kingdoms: on the north side of the Bagmati river, Kathmandu itself, known also as Kantipur, kanti meaning ‘lustrous’; Patan, also known as Lalitpur, ‘the beautiful city’; and Bhaktapur on the eastern side of the valley, the ‘city of devotees’, known also as Bhadgaon. Each of these three towns had – and has – names in Newari, the Tibeto-Burmese language of the valley’s original urban dwellers: Yambu for Kathmandu, Yala for Patan and Khwopa for Bhaktapur. Despite recent decades of mass migration, Newars still form almost a third of the wider urban population of modern Kathmandu.

Siddhi Narasimha Malla, the Patan king who had instituted the Kartik

dances twenty years earlier, had only just died and Grueber, as he wrote in a letter to his superiors in Austria, discovered the valley of ‘Nekbal’ in a state of war. The king of Kathmandu, Pratap Malla, was testing the resolve of the new king of Patan, Srinivasa, Siddhi Narasimha’s son. The two men had a grandfather in common, the last king to rule both Kathmandu and Patan. Such Lilliputian squabbles must have baffled a veteran of the Qing court like Grueber, who was anyway more interested in Christian souls than the family quarrels of obscure Himalayan kings. To that end, he presented Pratap with an ingratiating gift: a small telescope, a slice of Europe’s emerging technological revolution that would drive the Enlightenment. Pratap put the telescope to his eye and saw the troops of Srinivasa leap into focus, apparently within touching distance. ‘Let us march against them!’ Pratap cried. He was so delighted with the telescope and other ‘mathematical instruments’ Grueber left behind that he promised to build the Austrian a house and allow him to teach the gospel if he agreed to return.

Pratap’s shift in perspective as he held the telescope to his eye is

somehow emblematic of the Malla dynasty’s self-absorption, cupped in the palm of their fertile valley at 1,400 metres. The magical telescope had brought his fixation even closer, much to his delight. What happened beyond the ring of mountains was only of marginal importance: a point of view that endured long after the Malla kings fell from power. The vigorous new dynasties that replaced them would also fall under the valley’s spell. It was such a fascinating world, why go elsewhere? When Grueber did leave Kathmandu he trekked some sixty kilometres to the town of Hetauda, then on the fringes of the tiny hill kingdom of Makwanpur. In Makwanpur he saw a custom-house, evidence of the mighty Mughal Empire to the south, to which the kings of the Kathmandu valley paid tribute each year: treasure and elephants. In this way, the Malla kings kept the world at a distance, unless an alliance with rulers outside offered advantage to one of the kingdoms in the endless skirmishes with their neighbours. That habit would be at least part of their undoing. The business of the world was becoming more insistent: they couldn’t keep it out for ever.

Almost sixty years later, in 1721, the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri

was ordered back to India when a rival monastic order, the Capuchins, took over the Catholic mission in Lhasa. He stopped off in Kathmandu on his way south to Goa and witnessed a similar confrontation to the one Grueber had seen:

Whether caused by compassion for all living creatures or by lack of courage, [Newari] behaviour in war is most ridiculous and fantastic. When two armies meet they launch every sort of abuse at one another, and if few shots are fired, and no one is hurt, the attacked army retires to a fortress, of which there are many, resembling our country dovecotes.

This was not altogether sneering: the dovecotes of Italian architect Andrea Palladio, which it’s reasonable to suspect he had in mind, were exquisite.

But if a man is killed or wounded, the army which has suffered begs for peace, and sends a dishevelled and half-clothed woman, who weeps, beats her breast and implores mercy, the cessation of such

carnage, and such shedding of human blood. The victorious army then dictates terms to the vanquished and war ends.

Such choreographed posturing was simply another example of the Malla dynasty’s chief concern: art in all its forms. From pyakha, ritual dance-dramas like the Kartik Naach, to protracted and dramatic festivals, to the architecture of palaces and temples, to the exquisite Newari painting, metalwork and wood carving produced in the valley’s workshops, the Malla kingdoms are a good illustration of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed the theatre state, where expression of power through art and spectacle is not merely a means to an end, a kind of propaganda, but the purpose of that power and the source of its renewal. This theatrical statecraft reached its zenith in the mid seventeenth century and Pratap Malla was among its most successful practitioners. Nor was he shy in saying so. He transformed both Kathmandu’s Durbar Square and the palace complex of Hanuman Dhoka. Under the icon of the monkey-faced god Hanuman outside its main entrance he commanded a new inscription to be added, identifying himself as: ‘King of Kings, Chief of Nepal, extremely clever, Chief of all Kings, Twice Illustrious Great King, Poet Laureate, Enthroned Lord Jaya Pratap Malla.’ Inside the palace is an impressive stone carving of Narasimha in the act of disembowelling the demon Hiranyakashipu, his eyes and teeth picked out in silver.

Having mocked Newars for the ineffectual theatricality of their soldiery,

Desideri also condemned them for their preference for sly assassination. ‘Nearly all bear deceit written on their faces.’ He thought them ‘unstable, turbulent and traitorous’, a harsh assessment from a man born in the medieval Tuscan city of Pistoia, only a few kilometres from Florence, another city-state built on trade, finance, religion, art and brutal political feuding. Perhaps it was the introspection of the valley that left Desideri unimpressed. He had visited the former Mughal capital Agra on his way to Tibet, and seen the architectural glories of that empire. Perhaps he lacked the artistic imagination to make sense of the Kathmandu valley’s unique cultural achievement. Newars were, he admitted, ‘intelligent, and very industrious, clever at engraving and melting metal’, but his only comment on the hundreds of temples he saw was that they were ‘generally small’.

Those temples told a rich story of the deep cultural bonds between

central Tibet and Kathmandu winding their way back and forth across the high mountain passes. Desideri missed it, but his predecessor João Cabral, writing a century earlier, read the architecture more carefully. In a letter to his superior Alberto Latertius, stationed on the Malabar coast of India, he described the Tibetans he encountered in Shigatse, their wealth and the ‘great fields of wheat, and I never saw land that looked more like the Alemtejo in Portugal.’ He explained also that the Tibetans ‘have the same pagodas as the kingdom of Nepal and some of Bengal. Only in the superstition of castes and eating habits, which they do not hold, are they different.’ Thus Cabral sketched out the centuries-old transmission of tantric Buddhist culture from the Pala dynasty of Bengal through Kathmandu to Tibet.

Desideri, by contrast, had little interest in material things. His focus was

Tibetan Buddhism. It annoyed him that Athanasius Kircher was still peddling the idea of Tibetan Buddhism’s links to Christianity in his immense work China Illustrata. Desideri had actually been there and studied the issue: he knew Kircher was wrong. Reincarnation fascinated Desideri, who referred to it as ‘metempsychosis’, a term popularised by Pythagoras, and he noticed that Newars believed in it ‘to an even greater extent than the Thibettans’. Yet while priests in Italy could also be scientists, the gurus he met in Kathmandu seemed to Desideri merely irrational. ‘They are very superstitious in all things, futile observers, and utter heathens.’

*

Kircher once wrote that ‘the sun never sets on the actions of the Society of Jesus’, so wide was its geographical spread. Something similar was said of the British Empire, which arrived on the fringes of the Himalaya in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first Briton to visit Kathmandu was Captain William Kirkpatrick, not a priest but an emissary of the East India Company, who arrived in early 1793. His mission had failed before it began: Kirkpatrick was there to mediate in a trade war that had erupted between Nepal’s new Gorkha dynasty and Tibet in 1788. When Gorkhali troops crossed the mountains to loot Tibetan monasteries, including Tashilhunpo, the Dalai Lama appealed for help to the Qing dynasty and the Qianlong emperor, who sent a large Chinese army to clear them out. Having come within around thirty kilometres of Kathmandu, the Chinese, overextended and suffering heavy casualties, withdrew, signing a treaty with the Gorkhali regent that settled the affair (see Chapter Eight). Kirkpatrick was no longer required. The Gorkhalis, who had wanted military support from the East India Company, were bitter about the British sitting on their hands and weren’t disposed to greet Kirkpatrick warmly. There was little for him to do but be a tourist for a week before he went back to Calcutta.

Kirkpatrick made the most of it. Arriving at Chandragiri, on the western

rim of the encircling mountains, he described the Kathmandu valley as ‘beautifully and thickly dotted with villages and abundantly chequered with rich fields’, like an English country gentleman looking down on an estate he might wish to acquire. Kirkpatrick was a gentleman but had been born illegitimate into a family with plantations in the Carolinas, a family now looking for a fresh colonial start in the wake of the American Revolutionary War. Where better to boost one’s social status than India? (His third daughter Julia would marry into the influential Strachey family, making him the great-grandfather of Lytton Strachey. His grandsons were the same Strachey brothers that explored Kailas.) Kirkpatrick had orders from his masters in Calcutta to make maps, observe military capability and take note of commercial opportunities: pashmina wool, salt, elephants and yak tails, as popular as flywhisks in the British Empire as they had been in the Roman. (They were also used as beards in Chinese opera.)

Kirkpatrick was fluent in Persian, intellectually curious but most of all

practical. If the Jesuit Desideri was gripped by metaphysical concepts, Kirkpatrick admired useful things. This was how European knowledge of Nepal accreted, on the scaffold of each traveller’s particular perspective. Kirkpatrick published the first illustration of the Nepali blade known as the khukuri in the book he wrote about his journey.

[I]t is in felling small trees or shrubs, and lopping the branches of others for this purpose, that the dagger, or knife worn by every Nepaulian, called Khookheri, is chiefly employed; it is also of very great use, as I repeatedly experienced, in clearing away the road when obstructed by the low hanging boughs of trees, and other similar impediments.

Knives were of obvious appeal to a military man, but he also took a close interest in building materials, noticing the elegance and complexity of Nepali bricks:

Nepaul in general is remarkable for the excellence of its bricks and tiles, but those of Bhatgong [Bhaktapur] are commonly allowed to be very far preferable to the rest. Certain it is, they surpass any I ever met in India, but it is not equally certain from whence their excellence proceeds. Some of those whom I questioned on the subject, referred it to the nature of the earth used in making them, and some to the water in tempering them; while others affirmed it to arise purely from a particular mode of burning them.

In studying bricks, Kirkpatrick had zeroed in on one of the key architectural motifs characterising Newari architecture, something that reached to the heart of a culture Europeans were struggling to understand. He arrived at the moment when the artistic and architectural glory days of Newari craftsmen were starting their decline, with the Malla kings gone from power. His question, ‘from whence their excellence proceeds’, was profound, if unconsciously so. The immediate answer was all the factors he suggested: knowing where to find the best and different types of rich alluvial clay and the knack of firing them evenly. The city’s founding legend, as described in the Swayambhu Purana, gives a clue to this clay’s origins. It speaks of a lake that once filled the valley, teeming with naga or snakes, still a ubiquitous motif in the valley. The bodhisattva Manjushri came south from the mountains and cleft the valley’s southern rim, draining the water and leaving exposed the rich earth that gives the valley’s bricks their lustrous warmth: the architectural equivalent of a hug. There is a seamless flow between the clay of the fields and the walls of old Newari houses, harmonising with the intricately carved wooden windows and window screens, called tiki jhya, the struts, pillars and doors that complete Newari houses and temples. A signature detail of Newari building was a style of brick called dachi-apa, with the ends angled inward slightly toward the interior-facing side so that so that nothing prevents the exterior face, dipped in red clay slip before firing, from being flush with its neighbours. It’s a beautiful effect and seals the building’s façade against heavy monsoon rain, protecting the soft mortar beneath. There were no schools or manuals to follow in building such houses: just timeworn technologies, evolved over centuries. Nowadays the mortar is sticky yellow clay, but historically it was called silay and included all kinds of gloop: surkhi, or brick dust, lime and ghee (clarified butter), even molasses.

Typically this elegant exterior façade would be matched with an interior

wall of more conventional bricks; the gap between them was filled with rubble and clay. A wooden frame added strength to the structure. The overall effect of the soft mortar and wooden support is a defence against the regular seismic challenge of living in a planetary crumple zone. Yet if the earthquake is big enough, this style of building will come down. The stage on which the Kartik dances take place today stands in front of the sixteenth century Char Narayan temple in Patan, or at least it did. During the earthquake that struck Kathmandu in 2015, the two-tiered pagoda-style building was reduced to rubble. More recently, the Kartik Naach has taken place against a backdrop of empty space surrounded by a high metal fence. At least the temple’s materials, including its icons and carved roof struts were recovered, and safely stored before they were looted. The temple would soon be reconstructed, which is more than can be said for many of the private Newari houses that fell in the same tragic event.

Plenty of traditional Newari houses have gone anyway, torn down and

replaced with a style of house familiar all over Asia: reinforced concrete beams and pillars, shuttered with modern bricks. The contrast with traditional building methods couldn’t be more obvious. The old social networks that organised these neighbourhoods for centuries, the guthis, are the merest shadow of their former selves. Yet the modern buildings still occupy the same footprint that buildings have occupied for centuries and with the same arrangement of storeys, with the kitchen and prayer room on the top floor. When Newars speak of a house, they often mean the site it stands on, not the building itself. Families built on four sides around a courtyard, or chok, the focal point for daily life and festivals alike. The interior square is somewhere to dry grain, hang washing and look out for each other’s kids as they play. Each courtyard will have a shrine or chaitya, in its Nepali form an elegant diminutive stupa, spiritual power points along with the water supply and electricity. Every day starts before dawn with the sound of bells being rung and the smell of incense as the city wakes up and makes an offering, rice and a smear of vermilion on an icon. Doors and thresholds in particular are focal points: during the monsoon, for example, at the festival of Nag Panchami, pictures of snakes are pasted above doorways alongside magical mantras to ward them off. These are intimate spaces; people live so close that every argument is heard, every joke shared. You could not design a more fertile environment for gossip and rumour. Seeking privacy, and a dependable water supply, wealthier families have moved out to the suburbs. And these days there are usually a couple of motorbikes parked next to the shrine. But even now the pattern of life goes on in broadly similar terms as it did when Kirkpatrick took his tour, albeit with only a tiny fraction of the squalor and disease he witnessed. ‘The hamlets and villages in these mountainous tracts exhibited, at a distance, an appearance highly romantic,’ he wrote, touching on his era’s zeitgeist, its taste for the sublime, although ‘on a nearer view this delusion vanished, and the most prominent picture that remained displayed the squalidness of poverty, and the miseries of distress.’

The religious ambition of Jesuit missionaries and the Orientalist view of

Romanticism gave way eventually to proper academic study of Kathmandu’s complex but aesthetically rewarding interplay of cultural genius and Himalayan politics. Even then, European prejudice could get in the way. Born in 1841 Gustave Le Bon was an early anthropologist who read Darwin and decided there was a correlation between cranium size and intelligence, an evolutionary explanation for European ‘superiority’. The theory won him a prize from the French Academy of Sciences. He developed a portable cephalometer for measuring the skulls of different ethnic groups he met in the field and for the rest of his long and eclectic career, the idea that culture was somehow a consequence of race was never far from his thoughts.

In the 1880s the French government commissioned Le Bon to travel

though the subcontinent and report back on the cultures he found there. Thus he became one of the first Frenchmen to visit Kathmandu, more or less closed to foreigners beyond the few British servants of the Raj then stationed there. He arrived in 1885, first visiting Kathmandu and then the ancient Buddhist stupa at Swayambhunath, the most sacred site in the valley for Buddhist Newars. Nothing, with the possible exception of Coleridge’s poem, had quite prepared him for what he experienced at Patan, as he walked among the temples and palaces:

I doubt that an opium-eater has ever dreamt, in his wildest dreams, of a more fantastic architecture than the one of this strange city. Although I have visited Europe, from London to Moscow and the whole of the classic Orient, from Morocco to Egypt and Palestine, I had until then never seen a more striking scene than the main street in Patan.

Le Bon was strong on theorising and opinion but often in too much of a hurry for the detailed work that underpinned proper scholarship. While in Kathmandu, he took lots of photographs and dashed off a travelogue about Nepal’s ancient past. Then he moved on to fresh intellectual pastures: the psychology of crowds. Having witnessed the Paris Commune as a young man, he developed an aversion to socialism and a fascination for how humans behave in large groups. His groundbreaking book on the subject, Psychologie des Foules, was an instant bestseller, influencing everyone from the public relations guru Edward Bernays to Benito Mussolini.

Sylvain Lévi would prove a much more reliable scholar. Born in Paris in

1863, the son of a cap-maker, by the age of twenty he was studying Sanskrit at the Sorbonne under the brilliant Indologist Abel Bergaigne and tutoring the children of France’s chief rabbi Zadoc Kahn. Five years later, when Bergaigne died in a hiking accident in the French Alps, Lévi took his place. One of his chief concerns as a scholar was how Indian Buddhism had shaped the cultures of Asia. Lévi believed that in Kathmandu he would find examples of Indian art that had disappeared from the rest of the subcontinent: ‘India in the making’, as he put it, a living fossil from which he could extrapolate whole worlds that had faded elsewhere to extinction. In 1898 he arrived in Kathmandu, fuming that the local population was ‘absolutely, totally, radically ignorant’, and lecturing to them from their own temples in perfect Sanskrit. When the priest at the temple of Changu Narayan refused him admittance, he had the maharaja lend him four soldiers to trace an important inscription from the fifth century, pinning down details of the Licchavi dynasty’s rise to power. Marshalling all that he had learned, Lévi was able to write a three-volume history of Nepal, producing a sweeping narrative that has underpinned Nepal’s historiography ever since.

When Lévi returned to France, he got a letter from Gustave Le Bon, who

had maintained his interest in Nepal and was asking to meet. Lévi wasn’t keen. He had bitter memories of Le Bon, who had sought his help in securing a grant from the government for a book of his Kathmandu photographs. Having pocketed the cash, Le Bon had then publicly dismissed Lévi’s work on the impact of Ancient Greek culture on India, despite not knowing the first thing about it. Lévi wrote back that Le Bon, a photograph man, would find his manuscripts and inscriptions too boring. He then invoked his meticulous and open-minded Sanskrit teacher, Abel Bergaigne, telling Le Bon how he shared Bergaigne’s ‘wonderful incomprehension’ of India, a sly dig at Le Bon’s grandiose complacency.

This wasn’t merely a spat between academics. Ancient Indian culture

carried a contemporary political edge in an era when spurious racial theories were held by leading intellectuals. The eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language, Indo-European, common to ancient languages like Latin and Sanskrit, not only galvanised academic interest but also inspired dangerous ideas. Racial theorists came up with a common human ancestor so superior that their culture spread throughout Asia and Europe: an Aryan master-race. The publication of Eugène Burnouf ’s Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, the most influential book on Buddhism in the nineteenth century, gave similar prominence to fringe ideas, such as those of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophists, involving the lost wisdom of ancient non-Christian philosophies. Burnouf ’s own cousin Émile, another Sanskrit scholar, was one of those who argued for the existence of an Aryan master-race, believing not only that Jesus was an Aryan, but that the swastika was a symbol of this ancient race’s fire-altars, a notion that appealed to the Nazis.

Gustave Le Bon wasn’t so extreme, but he was cut from the same cloth,

and Lévi knew it. As a Jew, he could see where such talk was headed. In 1925, eight years before Adolf Hitler came to power and ten years before his own death, he told an interviewer of his enduring debt to his old teacher Abel Bergaigne:

if you write four lines about my work I would like at least three of them to be about Bergaigne. It was he, after [Eugène] Burnouf, who put Vedic studies in the path, which they have followed ever since. The Germans, assured of their antiquity and purity of their race, proclaimed themselves the direct heirs of the ancient civilizations of India … Bergaigne was the first to cause this fiction to crumble.

Lévi would remain a committed defender of Jewish rights for the rest of his life, denouncing antisemitism in a speech at the Trocadéro Palace in Paris in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

After the Second World War, as Nepal became accessible and began to

develop a modern economy, interest in and knowledge of Kathmandu’s architectural heritage deepened and broadened but followed in essence the lead of Lévi’s formative narrative. A notable example was the work of Mary Slusser, who arrived as the wife of an American aid worker and then spent decades in a systematic study of the valley’s cultural heritage, culminating in groundbreaking books, Nepal Mandala and The Antiquity of Nepalese Wood Carving. At the same time, the Kathmandu valley’s rapid development raised concerns that its unique architectural legacy would be swept aside. Bhaktapur’s main temple and palace complex was the subject of a visionary and brilliantly led conservation effort and is now a hugely popular stop for tourists exploring the valley, which means it can at times feel rather selfconsciously like heritage. Götz Hagmüller and Niels Gutschow, both long-time residents of the town, were among several influential Austrian and German conservation architects to work in the city. Hagmüller later led the restoration of Keshav Narayan Chowk, an eighteenth-century palace in Patan Durbar Square, which now houses the Patan Museum, among the finest in South Asia, housing some of the best examples of Newari art. Another Austrian architect working on the project, Thomas Schrom, persuaded Patan’s authorities to close the square with its palaces and temples to motorised vehicles, turning one of the glories of world architecture into a haven from the city’s manic traffic and a window onto the labyrinthine complexities of the religious culture that produced it.

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