Three Malla Kingdoms: Why the Valley Has Three Durbar Squares

Visitors and students constantly ask the same question: why are there three grand royal squares, each with its own old palace, packed into a valley barely 25 km across? The answer is political. Until 1482 CE (roughly 1539 BS) the whole Kathmandu Valley was a single kingdom ruled from Bhaktapur by the Malla dynasty. When the powerful king Yaksha Malla died that year, his inheritance was divided, and within a couple of generations the valley had fractured into three separate, sovereign city-states, each with its own king, its own palace and its own capital square.

Those three capitals were Kantipur (present-day Kathmandu), Lalitpur (Patan) and Bhadgaon or Bhaktapur. Each capital's Durbar Square (durbar means royal court or palace) was the seat of its dynasty. Because the three kings were neighbours and rivals for nearly three hundred years, they competed to out-build one another, filling their squares with ever more ambitious temples and palaces. The clustering of three royal capitals so close together is unique in South Asia and is exactly why the Kathmandu Valley preserves such a dense concentration of medieval monuments.

This page explains the split, the rivalry and the building boom, and maps each surviving landmark to the king who commissioned it. For the individual squares themselves, see amarnepal.com's dedicated entries on Kathmandu Durbar Square, Patan Durbar Square and Bhaktapur Durbar Square.

The Malla dynasty ruled the Kathmandu Valley from the early 13th century, following the earlier Licchavi period. The dynasty's high point of unified administration came under Jayasthiti Malla (reigned late 14th century), who is credited with codifying social and legal customs, and then under his grandson Yaksha Malla (reigned c. 1428-1482 CE), who ruled a single, prosperous kingdom from Bhaktapur that stretched well beyond the valley rim.

Yaksha Malla represented the last flowering of a united Nepal Mandala under one Malla crown. During this era the valley grew rich as the essential entrepot on the trade routes between the Indian plains and Tibet, with caravans passing through Banepa to the north-east and through Nuwakot and Rasuwa to the north-west. That wealth would later bankroll the temple-building rivalry, but only after the kingdom itself came apart.

When Yaksha Malla died in 1482 CE, his territory was divided among his heirs. His sons at first tried to rule collegially in the old shared pattern, but joint rule quickly collapsed. Ratna Malla broke away first, seizing Kathmandu (Kantipur) and ruling there independently until his death in 1520. Patan (Lalitpur) and Bhaktapur (Bhadgaon) likewise crystallised into separate kingdoms, each under its own line of Malla kings.

The valley did not split neatly into three at a single stroke. For a long period it was effectively a patchwork that also included the semi-independent principality of Banepa to the east and the fortified town of Kirtipur, which functioned as a strategic outpost linked to Patan and Kathmandu. Banepa retained a distinct identity for generations before being reabsorbed by Bhaktapur in the mid-17th century. Contemporary chronicles and later histories such as the Bhasha Vamshavali (the vernacular chronicle translated in Daniel Wright's History of Nepal) preserve the tangle of shifting borders, alliances and betrayals.

The three main kingdoms each controlled a slice of the surrounding hills. Broadly, Bhaktapur looked east toward the Dudh Koshi, Kathmandu commanded the northern routes toward Nuwakot, and Patan held the southern approaches toward Makwanpur. Their borders sometimes ran through a single town or even a single field, which kept the three courts in near-constant friction.

Because the three kingdoms were small, roughly equal and permanently jealous, their rivalry played out not only in border skirmishes but in prestige projects. Historians often compare the atmosphere to Renaissance Italy: neighbouring courts competing to sponsor the finest architects, sculptors and metalworkers, so that each king's Durbar Square would eclipse his neighbour's. Every new temple, gilded gateway or towering shikhara was as much a statement of royal power as an act of devotion.

This dynamic explains why the same landmark forms recur in all three squares, often as deliberate answers to one another. Each capital built a grand temple to Taleju Bhawani, the Mallas' royal tutelary goddess; each has a many-storied palace with elaborate courtyards; each has multi-roofed pagodas and stone or metal statuary flanking the palace entrance. The Krishna Mandir at Patan and the great Taleju temple at Kathmandu, for instance, are frequently read as competitive responses between the courts of Siddhi Narsingh Malla and Pratap Malla, who were contemporaries and rivals.

The competitive era peaked in the 17th and early 18th centuries under a run of ambitious builder-kings, most famously Pratap Malla in Kathmandu, Siddhi Narsingh Malla in Patan, and Bhupatindra Malla in Bhaktapur. Their reigns produced most of the monuments tourists photograph today. The irony is that this fierce disunity, so ruinous politically, is precisely what gave Nepal its richest architectural heritage.

Much of what survives in the three Durbar Squares can be traced to specific Malla kings, which is why the squares double as open-air museums of rival dynastic ambition. In Kathmandu (Kantipur), King Mahendra Malla built the towering Taleju temple in 1564 CE, and King Pratap Malla (reigned 1641-1674) transformed the Hanuman Dhoka palace complex, adding the Hanuman statue at the gate (1672), the fearsome Kal Bhairav image, the Nasal Chowk courtyard and numerous inscriptions and shrines.

In Patan (Lalitpur), King Siddhi Narsingh Malla built the celebrated Krishna Mandir in 1637 CE, a stone shikhara temple entirely carved from stone in the North-Indian style, unusual among the valley's brick-and-timber pagodas. His court also laid out much of the Patan palace and its water-spout courtyards. In Bhaktapur (Bhadgaon), King Bhupatindra Malla (reigned c. 1696-1722) commissioned both the Palace of Fifty-Five Windows and the five-storey Nyatapola temple, which he founded in 1702 CE and which remains the tallest pagoda-style temple in Nepal; his gilded seated statue still surveys the square from a stone pillar.

These attributions come from temple inscriptions, chronicles and the standard scholarship, above all Mary Slusser's Nepal Mandala, the definitive cultural study of the valley. Dates for individual monuments occasionally vary by a year or two across sources because they may record the start, consecration or completion of construction.

The very division that fuelled the building boom left the valley fatally weak. Its three kings distrusted one another and rarely combined against outside threats. From the west, King Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha exploited that disunity in a patient decades-long campaign, first choking the valley's trade and then storming its towns one by one. The strategic town of Kirtipur fell after bitter fighting, opening the way to the three capitals.

Kathmandu (Kantipur) fell in September 1768, famously on the night of the Indra Jatra festival while the city was absorbed in celebration; its last king, Jaya Prakash Malla, fled. Patan (Lalitpur) was taken the same year, and Bhaktapur (Bhadgaon), the final holdout under Ranajit Malla, capitulated in 1769. With that, roughly 550 years of Malla rule and nearly three centuries of the three-kingdom era ended, and Prithvi Narayan Shah made Kathmandu the capital of a unified Nepal ruled from the Hanuman Dhoka palace.

Crucially, the Shah conquerors did not demolish the rival squares; they inherited and used them. That is why all three Durbar Squares survived largely intact into the modern era, damaged more by the 1934 and 2015 earthquakes than by conquest. Today all three, along with the Swayambhunath, Boudhanath, Pashupatinath and Changu Narayan monument zones, make up the single Kathmandu Valley UNESCO World Heritage property, inscribed in 1979.