Nepal King’s vacant palace now a tourist haunt

KATMANDU, Nepal

Pity the king. He has had to flee his palace, with its Graceland-meets-the-Himalayas decor, and decamp to a house up the hill. His only son, the hard-living former crown prince, has moved to Singapore. And now, in a crowning indignity, tourists are traipsing through what was once a private world sealed off by soldiers and tall brick walls.

Just three years ago, he was King Gyanendra, ruling this mountain nation with absolute power as the living embodiment of the Hindu god Vishnu. Today, he is simply Gyanendra Shah, a 61-year-old businessman with interests in hotels and tea plantations who clings to the royal title only by tradition. He lives in a small house in the Katmandu hills with his wife and doesn’t give interviews.

He has become a national shadow, a man seen only in Nepal’s tiny high society and known for his cocktail parties but little else.

And his Narayanhiti Palace? Tickets cost about $1.50, payable at the window out front.

Every day, hundreds of Nepalis arrive here to look into the past couple of decades of their country’s troubled history, with its royal intrigue, its family bloodshed and its isolated and deeply unpopular monarch who didn’t realize until things were beyond his control that history wasn’t with him anymore.

Inside, tourists stare at the dusty hunting trophies, the mirrored pillars and the royal portrait - a gift from the Chinese government - that looks like a pencil drawing but actually is made from human hair. They wander through room after room of vinyl furniture, gold carpets and decades-old silver-framed photographs (the Shah of Iran, Bobby Kennedy, various popes).

The palace, a pink concrete hulk built in the late 1960s, stretches across 52 rooms and nearly 41,000 square feet. It seems to go on forever.

“In this age of democracy, how can an enlightened person accept such an institution?” Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal asked in an interview. “The Nepali people are relaxed that they no longer have this burden.”

But it’s not that simple.

A year after the monarchy was abolished, after 2006 protests that brought back parliamentary democracy, Nepal remains battered by encyclopedic troubles that belie its reputation as a Shangri-La. Democracy has not been the curative that Nepalis had hoped for.

Nearly 70 percent of the country lives on less than $2 a day and its literacy rate ranks it between Yemen and Mauritania. Katmandu is better off than the countryside, but this city was enveloped years ago by traffic and smog and its infrastructure is on the verge of collapse. Power outages often last more than 18 hours.

Then there is the political scene, which is dominated by corrupt, squabbling parties and former Maoist guerrillas whose 10-year war left 13,000 people dead before the rebels entered mainstream politics.

So if most Nepalis seem happy to have left the monarchy behind, it’s also not hard to find people who miss the king - even if they are surprised to hear themselves admit it.

“After seeing all this, now I do feel sorry for him,” said Durga Shrestha, 31, as he walked through what used to be the private royal quarters. “He had all this, he lived so well, but now he has to live like an ordinary man,” said Mr. Shrestha, a stationery store owner who cheered on the anti-Gyanendra protests that helped usher in democracy.

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