Tanahun Districtतनहुँ जिल्ला

Tanahun (officially also written Tanahu) spans 1,546 km² of mid-hills along the Prithvi Highway midway between Kathmandu and Pokhara, with almost ninety percent of its area in the warm 300–1,000 m belt. The headquarters Damauli, in Vyas Municipality, sits at the confluence of the Seti and Madi rivers beside the cave where the sage Ved Vyas, compiler of the Mahabharata, is by tradition said to have been born — the source of the municipality's name. Highway junctions define the district's economy: Dumre is the turn-off for Besisahar and the Annapurna Circuit, and Aanbu Khaireni for Gorkha.

The district is the birthplace of Bhanubhakta Acharya (born 1814 at Chundi Ramgha), the 'Adikavi' or first poet of the Nepali language, whose rendering of the Ramayana into Nepali made him a unifying literary figure celebrated every year on Bhanu Jayanti. Magar (about 26%) and Gurung (11%) communities are the largest groups in a population of 321,153 (2021) that has stayed essentially flat since 2011 — the smallest change in the province — while literacy stands at 81.6%. Hydropower is a defining industry: the NEA's 69 MW Marsyangdi station at Aanbu Khaireni has run since 1989, and the 140 MW Tanahu storage project on the Seti, one of Nepal's few large reservoir schemes, is under construction near Damauli.

Tanahun's showpiece is Bandipur, a beautifully preserved hilltop bazaar of Newar merchants who moved up from Bhaktapur onto the old India–Tibet trade route; bypassed by the highway in the 1970s, its intact street of carved facades has been revived as a 'living museum' of Newari culture with sweeping Himalayan views, and Siddha Gufa below the town is described by the Nepal Tourism Board as Nepal's largest cave. On the district's southern tip, Devghat Dham at the confluence of the Kali Gandaki and Trishuli is one of Nepal's holiest river junctions, where pilgrims gather for Makar Sankranti and many devout Hindus spend their final years.