The man who brought Sherlock Holmes to Kathmandu

A short tribute to Nepal scholar Ted Riccardi, who passed away on Tuesday. Few had engaged with Nepal’s history as Riccardi had, and for that, we must be thankful.

Shortly after 1891, when Bir Shumsher ruled Nepal, a tall and lanky Englishman entered Kathmandu via Banepa, on the same route Newar traders had used to travel to Tibet for hundreds of years. The visitor, whose grey eyes constantly observed everything around him and whose nose would stand out in a crowd, had been travelling across Tibet under the guise of Norwegian explorer Sigerson, and now had accompanied a Newar trader back to Kathmandu. ‘There are few places, Watson, that affect one as much as Nepal. One of our countrymen has written that it would take the pen of a Ruskin or the brush of a Monet to do it justice, and in those judgements I must concur. The climate is salubrious, the people friendly and as handsome as the landscape’, the Englishman would later recall.