THE MILITARY TREASURE OF NEPAL
In 1814 the Gurkha Regiments of the Nepalese Army invaded Northern India, at that time controlled by the British East India Company. The British responded and by 1816 had driven back the invaders and in turn had invaded Nepal. The King of Nepal was convinced by his Prime Minister Blimsen Thapa to make peace with the British.
In 1839, Thapa, who had retired to his ancestral Palace of Bhote Bahal Marg in Katmandu, was arrested for treason and after refusing to confess even under torture, he was threatened that his principle wife and children would be dragged through the streets, naked and then executed. In despair, he committed suicide. When his wife heard of this, she also committed suicide by hanging herself from a window in the palace.
In 1845, this wrong was redressed by Thapa’s nephew, who gained power and purged the responsible parties. However, because of the tragedy the palace was never re-inhabited after 1839 and was converted into a Royal Armoury. Over time the property became known as the Lagan Silekhana (Silekhana = Armoury) Palace.
During the conflict of 1814-16 the British and Gurkha soldiers gained a strong respect for each other and as a result Gurkha regiments, based in Nepal, were developed in the British Army and have served with great distinction to the present day. As the Gurkhas were a part of the British Army from 1816 much of their weaponry came from England. With time it was supplemented in part by weapons produced in Nepal and India. Strangely, the Nepalese government seldom disposed of any surplus weapons used by the Gurkhas, possibly because they felt they were the property of England. As a result, through the years all of these weapons were merely stored in the Lagan Silekhana Palace.
In 1969, Christian Cranmer, a young Englishman with a deep interest in militaria heard of this treasure and began to research it. By 1989 Cranmer was operating a successful military arms business, International Military Antiques, and began serious negotiations with the Nepalese government. He was joined in this endeavour by Sudhir Windlass of Windlass Steelcrafts. In 2000 a purchase was finally agreed upon and in 2003-04 a total of 430 tonnes of military weapons, covering the period of 1816 to 1945, and containing over 50,000 antique firearms, 150 cannon (including Russian cannon captured in the Crimean War and passed to the Gurkhas) and countless swords, daggers and kukris, was removed from the palace, transported to America and subsequently offered for sale by IMA and the Windlass holdings in the USA. The process is still an on-going one, with much of this material remaining to be cleaned, repaired and/or restored.
In the cache was a supply of approximately a million musket balls and flints. The flints were packed in wooden crates that still had the location and date of where they were originally knapped. Although some crates were broken and the lettering obscured, all the discernible lettering indicated that the flints had been knapped at Brandon, Suffolk, England in the years 1796-98.
