Rukum East Districtपूर्वी रूकुम जिल्ला

Rukum East — officially "Rukum (East)", created when the 2015 constitution split old Rukum between Lumbini and Karnali provinces — is the only district of Lumbini Province that reaches the high Himalaya. From river valleys it climbs through Kham Magar villages to the Dhaulagiri range, topping out at Putha Hiunchuli (Dhaulagiri VII, 7,246 m), while the 5,849 m rock pyramid of Sisne, the district's emblem, was an icon to the Maoist insurgents who made these hills a stronghold during the 1996–2006 war. More than half of the 1,325 km² Dhorpatan Hunting Reserve — Nepal's only hunting reserve, where licensed trophy hunting of blue sheep and Himalayan tahr funds conservation — lies within the district.

It is a district of national superlatives in miniature: just three local levels (Bhume, Putha Uttarganga and Sisne rural municipalities, with no urban municipality), the fewest of any of Nepal's 77 districts, and a 2021 population of only 56,786 — the smallest in the province — up 0.63% per year from 53,184 in 2011, scattered at 34 people per km². Roughly half the population is Magar, the second-highest district share in Nepal after Palpa, and literacy of 71.4% is the province's lowest. The interim headquarters is Rukumkot, in Sisne Rural Municipality beside the old bazaar of undivided Rukum — famed in folklore as the land of 52 lakes and 53 hills — though a long-pending proposal would move the seat to more central Golkhada.

Livelihoods rest on maize, potato and millet terraces, yak and sheep herding toward the reserve, and seasonal labour migration; the war-era trails through Bhume and Putha Uttarganga now form the upper leg of the Guerrilla Trek toward Dhorpatan, giving Nepal's youngest hill district a slow-building trekking economy.