Liglig Kot: The Hilltop Fort Behind Gorkha's Shah Kings

On a ridge in Nepal’s Gorkha district, about 1,437 meters above sea level, the stone footings of a fort look down on the valley of the Marsyangdi River.¹² People in Gorkha call the place Liglig Kot, kot being the word for a hill fort. It is remembered as the first stronghold won by Drabya Shah, a prince from neighboring Lamjung, in the middle of the sixteenth century. From that foothold his family took Gorkha, and from Gorkha his descendant Prithvi Narayan Shah set out two centuries later on the campaigns that created the modern state of Nepal.³²

That is the story as it is told today. The written record behind it is thinner than the story’s fame suggests, and the ground itself has not yet been studied in any published excavation. Liglig Kot is a place where tradition, early chronicles and unexcavated ruins point in roughly the same direction without yet meeting.

A fort above the Marsyangdi

Liglig overlooks a river that once marked the western edge of the small kingdom of Gorkha. Francis Hamilton, who spent fourteen months in Nepal in 1802 and 1803, repeated an earlier British observer’s statement that Gorkha’s old boundaries ran from the Trisulganga in the east to the Marsyangdi (he spells it “Marichangdi”) in the west.⁴ Under Drabya Shah, according to the account displayed in the Gorkha Museum, the kingdom extended to the Chepe River in the west and the Budhi Gandaki in the east.³ The Chepe joins the Marsyangdi below Liglig at a place called Chepeghat, and that confluence is the starting line of the race for which Liglig is now best known.⁵

Hamilton described Gorkha as a poor country, rather warmer than the Kathmandu Valley, whose people were chiefly Brahmans and Khas with “rather fewer Magars,” the Brahmans farming and the Khas and Magars serving as fighting men. Its capital stood “on a very high hill,” with about 2,000 houses and a temple of Gorakhanath, the saint from whom he suspected the town took its name.⁴ Gorkha town is a separate site from Liglig. Its later palace stands between two older stone forts, the Upallo Kot (upper fort) and Tallo Kot (lower fort), which local accounts and Nepali historians attribute to Khadka and Ghale chiefs who ruled before the Shahs.³

What the early chronicles say

Two early English-language versions of the founding of Gorkha both rest on Nepali sources and both tell a story of a younger son who took a neighbor’s land. Neither mentions Liglig.

One of Hamilton’s informants on the hill states west of Kathmandu was Prati Nidhi Tiwari, a learned Brahman whose family had long served as advisers to the rajas of Palpa.⁴ According to him, one of the Lamjung rajas “had a younger brother named Darbha Sahi, who as usual held the office of Chautariya; but rebelled, and took to himself Gorkha, the southern part of the principality.” Hamilton adds a fiscal detail: Lamjung’s raja had drawn 22,000 rupees a year from his lands, and the territory Darbha took accounted for 12,000 of them.⁴ Another account Hamilton heard in Nepal named the first chief of Gorkha as Rama Sahi, “whether a different name for Darbha, or his son, I do not know.” He also noted that the Gorkha chiefs joined none of the alliances formed by their neighbors, “trusting to their own vigour chiefly, for their country was very poor.”⁴

The second account is a vamsavali, a genealogical chronicle, translated from Parbatiya (Nepali) by Munshi Shew Shunker Singh with the help of Pandit Shri Gunanand and published in 1877 under the editorship of Daniel Wright, formerly the Residency surgeon at Kathmandu.⁶ It traces the Shahs through the rulers of Kaski and Lamjung to Yasobam Sah of Lamjung, whose elder son Narhari ruled Lamjung while the younger, Drabya Sah, “went to Gorkha, and gained over the subjects of that town, the raja of which was of a Khadka tribe of the Khas race.”⁶

The chronicle gives an exact day: Wednesday, the eighth of the dark half of Bhadon (the late-summer month of Bhadra) in Saka 1481, which it equates with 1559 CE. On that day, it says, Drabya Sah hid in a hut while his ally Ganesa Pande gathered the people of Gorkha who wore the sacred thread, including several Magar clans, and they attacked the palace. He killed the Khadka raja with his own sword and took the throne. Among the helpers the chronicle names are Ganesa Pande and a Gangaram Rana (the scanned text consulted reads “Gangirim,” an evident misreading of the print).⁶ A separate dynastic narrative in the same volume gives the year as Vikram Samvat 1616 (1559 CE), credits Drabya Shah with a body of regulations and land settlements known as his “Band-o-bast,” and says he reigned eleven years and died in 1570.⁶

Together these texts give the outline that the Gorkha Museum also follows: a Lamjung prince, a local raja overthrown, Brahman and Magar allies, and a date of 1559.³ What they record is the taking of Gorkha itself. If Liglig played a part, it was not part of the story as these informants told it to British visitors.

The tradition of the race

The Liglig episode enters the record through local memory, and it comes with a remarkable custom. According to the version repeated in Nepali news and travel reports, the ruler of Liglig was chosen each year by a footrace from Chepeghat up to the fort, and the winner became king for the year.⁷¹ A chief remembered as Dalsur Ghale Magar is said to have become the first such king by winning three times in a row.⁵⁸ A 2026 travel account has him winning twelve times in a row and describes him as Liglig’s last king rather than its first.¹ The Himalayan Times reported in 2016 that the race “is believed to have been held for the first time in 1604BS,” roughly 1547 CE.⁵ The report gives no basis for that year, and it would leave barely a dozen races before the traditional date of Drabya Shah’s conquest, which sits awkwardly with the image of a long-established custom.

How the custom ended is told in more than one way. Several reports say only that the tradition stopped after Drabya Shah took over Liglig in 1616 BS.⁷⁵ A 2018 report says he came to power “via the same race.”⁸ The 2026 travel feature gives a local account in which a disgruntled runner, Gangaram Rana Magar, guided Drabya Shah’s force along hidden routes to the fort after losing the race.¹ It is at least suggestive that Wright’s chronicle, compiled long before the modern revival, names a Gangaram Rana among Drabya Sah’s helpers at Gorkha.⁶ Whether the local story grew from that name, or the chronicle and the local story preserve the same memory independently, the sources consulted here cannot settle.

The Gorkha Museum, housed in the Tallo Durbar below Gorkha palace, gives the Liglig episode official form. Its gallery of the Gorkha state, as described by Ram Sharan Baniya of Tribhuvan University’s Gorkha campus, states that Dravya Shah attacked Ligligkot and defeated its local ruler before establishing Shah rule in Gorkha in 1559 (1616 BS). The first in its series of oil paintings of the Gorkha kings shows Dravya Shah attacking Ligligkot.³ On this reading the two traditions are steps in one campaign: Liglig first, then the Khadka raja at Gorkha. None of these sources dates the taking of Liglig itself. Wright’s chronicle dates only the attack on Gorkha, to the month of Bhadra, and the travel feature ties the Dashain date to the race rather than to Drabya Shah’s attack.⁶¹

What none of these sources provides is a contemporary document. No inscription or copperplate from the Liglig rulers has been cited in any source consulted for this article. The race, the Ghale kings and the defecting runner are, for now, oral tradition recorded in modern times, and they are best read as that.

What is on the hill

The physical remains are where Liglig could become more than a story. Ruins remain on the summit, and local people identify them as Drabya Shah’s early palace, built before he moved on to the forts at Gorkha.¹ A small roofless temple of the goddess Kalika stands nearby; local belief holds that the goddess asked in a dream to be housed without a roof.¹ The ruins are looked after by the community, and a large national flag now flies over the hilltop.¹

A web page of resources on Nepali language and culture, which links to this page, describes the remains as still awaiting proper archaeological investigation.² No published survey, excavation report or scientific date for the site turned up in research for this article, so that description still appears to hold.

That gap matters because the open questions are archaeological ones. When were the walls on the ridge built, and in how many phases? Was the summit occupied before the sixteenth century, as the tradition of Ghale and Magar rulers implies, or did it become a fort only during the wars among the hill states? Does anything on the hill date to Drabya Shah’s time at all, or were the structures now attributed to him built or rebuilt later? Careful mapping of the ruins, small test trenches and dating of charcoal or mortar could begin to answer these. Without that work, the identification of a palace of Drabya Shah rests on local memory, which may well be right but cannot yet be checked.

A race reborn

The custom that made Liglig famous has been revived as a sporting and tourist event. Organizers restarted the race in about 2009 or 2010, and by 2016 it had reached its seventh edition, with 143 runners on a course of about 13 kilometers from the Chepe-Marsyangdi confluence to the fort.⁵⁷ The modern race is held during the Dashain festival. A 2016 report ties it to Bijaya Dashami, but that year’s race was run on October 7, four days before the Dashami Tika day. In 2016 its expected cost was 1.4 million rupees, of which the Nepal Tourism Board contributed 500,000, and the winner received a crown along with the cash prize.⁷ By 2018 the winner was declared king for a year, with 60,000 rupees, a crown and a medal.⁸

The organizers have been open about their purpose. “The race might have started for a different purpose then but we restarted it seven years ago with the purpose of luring tourists in our place,” the organizing committee convenor, Purna Bahadur Rana, told The Himalayan Times in 2016.⁵ The group he led, Lig Lig Kot Bikash Abhiyan, which English-language papers also call the Ligligkot Development Campaign, described the event as a way to preserve the culture of the place and develop the area around it.⁷⁹ The event has also become a matter of local dispute: in October 2026 Palungtar Municipality and the Ligligkot Development Campaign announced rival dates for that year’s race.¹⁰

The revival has kept Liglig in public memory and drawn visitors to the hill. It has not yet drawn archaeologists. Until the hill is surveyed and dated, Liglig Kot remains what the sources make it: a fort with real ruins, a strong local tradition, and a founding story that the earliest written chronicles set at Gorkha itself.

Footnotes

1. Nepal 8th Wonder, August 28, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Linguae, “Nepali,” section “Liglig Fort.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Baniya 2022, pp. 147-150. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Hamilton 1819, introduction and chapter on the territories west of Nepal Proper (Lamjun and Gorkha). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. The Himalayan Times, October 8, 2016. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Wright 1877, preface; chapter “History of the Gorkhalis,” pp. 277-279 and 289-290. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. Republica, September 28, 2016. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

8. The Himalayan Times, October 14, 2018. ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. The Kathmandu Post, September 17, 2017. ↩

10. Kantipur, October 4, 2026 (headline and summary). ↩