/IPS DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN/ NEPAL: World Heritage Palace Pays For Own Upkeep

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Suman Pradhan

PATAN, Nepal, Jun 14 1997 (IPS) - Crowds of visitors are streaming to Nepal’s most famous heritage site, a former royal palace which has been opened to the public for the first time.

The richly-carved Patan Durbar or palace built of wood – once the seat of power of Malla Kings who ruled this city-kingdom in medieval times – opened at the end of May after more than a decade of restoration and renovation work executed by Austria.

Located in the heart of Patan, which together with the cities of Kathmandu and Bhaktapur are in the Kathmandu Valley, it is one of seven “world heritage sites” in this Himalayan kingdom identified by UNESCO. Its transformation from another one of Nepal’s neglected medieval monuments to a grand museum marks the start of an unusual experiment in heritage care for Nepal.

Visitors may not know, but their small entrance fee will be contributing to a revolutionary new idea of turning the Durbar into Nepal’s first self-sustaining museum, one that is able to survive without government handouts.

“We wanted the museum to be self-sustaining much like the small museums in Europe,” says Gotz Hagmuller, the Austrian chief rchitect and coordinator of the Patan Museum Project, which was financed by the Austrian government. “Some museums in Nepal cannot even pay their electricity bills.”

Kathmandu’s links with Austria go back many centuries. Historians say the first European traveller to Nepal was an Austrian missionary, Father Johannes Grueber, who arrived in the Valley in 1660, on his way to India from Tibet is said to have met King Pratap Malla, then ruler of the city-kingdom of Kathmandu, and a rival of Patan’s Malla kings.

Three centuries after this visit in 1976, another Austrian, Professor Eduard Sekler of Harvard University, led a UNESCO mission to Nepal. He prepared a master plan for the preservation of monuments within Kathmandu Valley and suggested the restoration of Patan Durbar as a specific project for the Austrian government.

The result was the Patan Museum Project, work on which began in 1983. Like most of Nepal’s crumbling heritage, the Patan Durbar too was a sorry sight. Decades of official neglect and natural decay since the late eighteenth century when its royal occupants fled the invading soldiers of King Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha, the founder of modern Nepal, had taken their toll.

Austria provided both the money and technical know-how for the palace restoration. Hagmuller recalls, “Our aim first was only to repair the damaged parts. But soon we expanded the project to include almost the entire palace. The ultimate goal became to convert it into a museum of international standards.”

An essential aspect of the restoration effort was the reliance on traditional Nepali artisans and masons. It was also decided early on that the museum would use only locally available appliances and equipments which can be replaced easily. Tus, there are no light-bulbs imported from Vienna or stationary from Salzburg.

In 1986, Hagmuller also hit upon the idea of turning the museum into a self-sustaining one, an idea that was resisted in the beginning by Nepal’s Department of Archaeology (DoA). None of Nepal’s hand full of museums generate sufficient revenue. All of them are doled out annual government funds which is barely enough to run their keep.

“There is no point in handing over a modern museum to the government, and then see it go downhill for want of funds”, says Hagmuller. The DoA, finally, was convinced about Hagmuller’s proposal.

The Patan Museum is the result of years of careful work. Though the museum has opened for public viewing, the official inauguration by Nepal’s constitutional monarch, King Birendra Prithvi Narayan Shah, is scheduled later in the year.

A pleased museum director Jal Krishna Shrestha who is also a DoA official, boasts, “the principal facade of the palace and its courtyards have been restored almost to the original when it was first built by Malla Kings in 1734.”

The museum also has a rare collection of more than 200 priceless pieces of art, most of them cast bronzes and gilt copper work, traditional crafts for which Patan is famous. The exhibit are meticulously housed in nine galleries within the Durbar.

“The museum’s exhibits cover a long span of Nepal’s cultural history and some rare objects are among its treasures,” explains Shrestha. “Their meaning and context within the living traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism are explained.”

The museum also houses a collection of 20 rare black and white pictures taken by an Austrian traveller, Dr Karl Boeck, while on a visit to Kathmandu in 1900. These pictures were presented to the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph in 1903, and were discovered in the Ethnographic Museum of Vienna.