ABSTRACT
In recent decades, Nepal’s dramatically rugged landscape and ethereal historic wood and masonry religious structures, public buildings and houses have beneted from the sustained attention of foreign architectural heritage protection organizations and participation of local institutions. This trend has led to a surge in conservation activity and traditional building skills in this mountainous nation. But conservation activity in Nepal is not a new phenomenon. The country’s rich cultural and architectural heritage, which is rooted in the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, includes many historic accounts of conservation eorts dating back centuries. Throughout the country, inscriptions recount maintenance and reconstruction regimes, ranging from the rebuilding of the Kanakmuni Buddha stupa in Niglihawa in 245 bce by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, to the reconstruction of numerous religious structures in Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan by the Shah King Ran Bahadur Shah, of the modern state’s founding dynasty, following a devastating earthquake in 1934.1
Support for historic built and civic architecture in the principle towns of Kathmandu Valley was sustained by other means as well. Traditionally parcels of agricultural land were set aside to provide revenue for the maintenance and repair of religious buildings in a practice termed the Guthi system. In 1962 the concept was institutionalized at the statewide level via large land acquisitions and the creation of the central administrative agency, the Guthi Sansthan.2 The forested mountainsides have historically provided plentiful building material, and a rich culture of wall painting has developed over the centuries, constituting the principal media for traditional design and artistic expression by ethnic groups such as the Newars. The nature of these building and decorative materials, however, compels ongoing maintenance and restoration, circumstances that have necessitated the perpetuation of traditional craft skills through the centuries. This wealth of “living,” or continuously used, architectural heritage has propelled Nepal’s many conservation projects – led rst and foremost by the Institute of Engineering and the Department of Archaeology, the Kathmandu oce of UNESCO and the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust (KVPT) – to the fore of the regional and international heritage management scene. The work of these groups has attracted the participation of additional foreign and multi-national eorts and nancial support since the earliest days of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention.
