Dynastic History|Bhaktapur's Fifty-Five Windows — After the Court, the Offices

The palace on Bhaktapur's square was completed in 1698, Nepal Sambat 818, under Bhupatindra Malla, and the carved window band along its upper floor — fifty-five of them, which is where the building's name comes from — has been altered less than anything else on the square since 1708. A study published by Bhaktapur Municipality names the three craftsmen who made the gilt gate beside it between 1751 and 1754: Subhakara, Karunakara and Ratikara. The square once held ninety-nine courtyards. Roughly fifteen survive.

The kingdom ended in 1769, when the Gorkha forces of Prithvi Narayan Shah took the city. Ranajit Malla, its last king, left for Varanasi at his own asking. After that the square was not kept up. Palace ground was turned over to government offices, schools and private houses, and close to two centuries of office use damaged the painted interiors past recovery; some were plastered over.

Then the earthquakes. The shocks of 1833 and 1934 reduced the square to roughly what a visitor walks through now. On 15 January 1934 the palace lost its top floor. The Chyasilin Mandap, the octagonal pavilion in front of it, came down nine hours after the shaking stopped, and its thirty-two carved struts were carried to Kathmandu and built into the New Road Gate. When German-assisted work rebuilt the pavilion in the 1980s the struts were not returned, so the team raised it with plain timber rather than copies, on the reasoning that the originals might still come back. It stood through 2015.

The Department of Archaeology and Bhaktapur Municipality run the square together.

📸 Cover: the fifty-five-window range of the Bhaktapur palace, Heli890, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons