Kyirong–Rasuwa corridor (Rasuwagadhi)केरुङ–रसुवागढी

Of all Nepal's passes, Kyirong — “valley of happiness”, rendered Kerung in Nepali — is the one where the deep past and the present most visibly overlap. The corridor follows the Trishuli river, guarded by the border fort of Rasuwagadhi in Rasuwa district, and was a principal conduit between the Kathmandu Valley and Tibet from the Licchavi period onward: Nepali tradition associates it with the 7th-century marriage route of Princess Bhrikuti, and the revered Arya Wati Zunpo image — the “Phagpa Lokeshvara of Kyirong” — travelled it. For the Lhasa Newars it was the warm-season alternative to Kuti and a salt-for-rice exchange post in its own right, where Nubripa, Langtangpa and Sherpa traders also collected the salt that reached the eastern valleys of Nepal.

Its military history bookends the trade story. Gorkha forces occupied Kerung in 1788, and the Kerung Treaty of 1789 was signed there; in 1792 the Qing counter-offensive marched down this same corridor into Nepal, and the war ended with the Treaty of Betrawati — Betrawati lying on the Trishuli at the corridor's southern end. The wars were fought, in other words, up and down the trade road itself.

The corridor's modern resurrection is a direct consequence of catastrophe elsewhere. When the April 2015 earthquake wrecked the Araniko Highway and the Zhangmu crossing, China steered virtually all overland Nepal trade to the newly opened (December 2014) Rasuwagadhi–Kerung point, pledged Rs 15 billion for upgrades and raised the crossing to international status — open to third-country nationals — on 31 August 2017. Within a decade a route that had carried mule caravans was carrying the overwhelming bulk of Nepal–China land trade: NPR 85.23 billion of imports against NPR 2.05 billion of exports in FY 2024/25. It is pencilled in as the alignment of the proposed Kerung–Kathmandu cross-border railway under the Belt and Road framework, and serves as a main overland artery for Kailash-Mansarovar pilgrimage tours. Its fragility is equally modern: a July 2025 flash flood on the Lhende/Trishuli destroyed the Rasuwagadhi (Miteri) friendship bridge, interrupting the route — a reminder that every artery across this range remains hostage to Himalayan geophysics.