Manaslu–Budhi Gandaki corridor (Nubri & Tsum)नुब्री र चुम (गोर्खा)

The Manaslu corridor never carried the bulk tonnage of the Kali Gandaki or Kuti roads — its passes are higher and its gorge harder — but for the communities of Nubri and Tsum it was everything. These are Tibetan valleys on the Nepal side of the line: the upper Budhi Gandaki villages of Samagaun, Lho and Prok (Nubri) and the Shyar Khola valley of Tsum, peopled — local traditions say — by 17th-century migrants from the plateau, speaking Tibetan dialects and ecclesiastically tied to Kyirong's monasteries just over the watershed. Their economy was the standard borderland tripod of high-altitude agriculture, transhumant herding and the salt–grain relay: Lazcano records the Nubripas among those collecting salt at the Kyirong and Rongshar marts, passing it into the Budhi Gandaki and over the roughly 5,106–5,160 m Larkya La (Larke pass) into Manang. Anthropologist Geoff Childs of Washington University, working in Nubri since 1995, has documented the region's history and trans-Himalayan trade in “A Brief History of Nub-ri” (2001) and Tibetan Diary (2004).

After 1959 the valleys experienced the common fate — the trade shrank to licensed trickles — compounded by Kathmandu's own restrictions: the whole region was a closed zone for foreigners until 1991, Tsum until 2008 (a chronology repeated across trekking literature, though no official source confirms it), which preserved its culture but froze its economy. Identity had followed trade: Samagaun's size and the great gompas of Lho and Chhekampar are artifacts of when these valleys sat on a living artery rather than at a dead end.

What persists today is the most intact small-scale survival of the old pattern anywhere in Nepal. After five years of COVID closure, China reopened both Gorkha border points in summer 2025 — Rui La above Samagaun on 5 July for one month, and Ngui La above Chhekampar on 1 July for three months (Ngui La operated year-round before the pandemic) — and villagers cross with their own horse caravans to sell yarsagumba and wild garlic in Tibetan markets and buy a winter's worth of rice, flour and consumer goods. The geography still rules: Tibet is one day away with their own horses, while Nepal's roadhead at Arughat or Gorkha bazaar is two or more days, with mule freight at Rs 35–40 per kilogram — about triple the cost. Only the commodities have been swapped.