Historical Maps of Pashupatinath

Pashupatinath’s location on the Bagmati River has been described, sketched, surveyed, and digitized across roughly twenty-five centuries — but it was named and revered in scripture for well over a thousand years before anyone drew it to scale. This page traces that full arc: how a sacred forest referenced in Vedic and Puranic geography became a cartographic subject for Licchavi-era inscriptions, medieval Nepal Mandala cosmology, colonial-era British surveyors, 20th-century topographers, UNESCO’s monument-zone cartographers, and today’s satellite and GIS platforms.

Few religious sites offer this kind of layered cartographic record: textual geography that predates any drawn map, courtyard inscriptions that functioned as proto-maps of royal genealogy and land grants, hand-surveyed colonial expedition maps, and now high-resolution aerial imagery, all describing the same stretch of riverbank in Deopatan. This entry is part of our About Pashupatinath guide. For the political and dynastic backdrop behind many of the maps discussed here, see History; for the scriptural geography that precedes all of them, see Mythology; and for a present-day, practical site map, see Temple Map.

Quick Answer: Pashupatinath’s Cartographic Record at a Glance

The sections below expand on each of these periods in order.

Before Cartography: Locating Pashupatinath in Scripture

No map of Pashupatinath exists from the Vedic or Mahabharata-era period, for a simple reason: formal, scaled cartography of the Kathmandu Valley did not exist yet. What existed instead was textual geography — descriptions in scripture and oral tradition that fixed Pashupatinath’s location symbolically and narratively, long before any surveyor fixed it in coordinates.

The Puranic tradition, discussed in depth on our Mythology page, places the site’s origin in a forested tract along the Bagmati River where Shiva and Parvati are said to have taken the form of deer — an area still known today as Mrigasthali, directly across the river from the main temple. The Mahabharata and various Puranas (notably the Shiva Purana and Skanda Purana) reference Pashupati as a name and form of Shiva connected to this general Himalayan region, functioning as devotional and cosmological geography rather than a surveyed location. This is consistent with how most ancient sacred sites across the subcontinent were “mapped” — through pilgrimage routes, oral tradition, and scripture, decades or centuries before any drawn plan of the site existed.

It’s worth being precise about what this means for a page on historical maps: claims that a “Vedic-era map of Pashupatinath” exists are not supported by the historical or cartographic record. What can be accurately said is that Pashupatinath appears in some of the oldest layers of Hindu sacred geography, and that this scriptural placement is what later, physical maps would eventually confirm and formalize on paper.

The Licchavi Era: Inscriptions as Proto-Maps

The Licchavi period (roughly 400–753 CE), covered in full on our History page, produced Nepal’s earliest reliable written records connected to Pashupatinath — but not maps in the cartographic sense. The most important surviving document from this era is a stone inscription in the temple courtyard, dated to 753 CE and attributed to King Jayadeva II, which references earlier Licchavi rulers by generational count.

Inscriptions like this functioned, in a real sense, as an early form of spatial record-keeping: they documented land grants, boundaries of temple-endowed property (guthi land), and the relative position of shrines and settlements around the sanctum. Historians and epigraphists piecing together the layout of early Deopatan rely heavily on this class of evidence — not drawn maps, but textual descriptions of “boundary markers,” neighboring shrines, and riverbanks — to reconstruct what the site plan likely looked like more than a thousand years ago. For more on this evidentiary record, see Archaeology and Ancient Records.

The Malla Era: Nepal Mandala and Symbolic Cartography

The Malla dynasty (roughly 12th–18th century), which is responsible for the majority of Pashupatinath’s present architectural form, also produced one of the most distinctive contributions to the valley’s cartographic tradition: the concept of the Nepal Mandala.

Rather than a scaled survey map, the Nepal Mandala is best understood as a cosmological and ritual diagram — a symbolic mapping of the Kathmandu Valley as a sacred, mandala-shaped space, with specific temples, shrines, and deities occupying meaningful positions relative to one another. Pashupatinath, as the valley’s most important Shaiva site, occupies a central position in this symbolic geography, alongside sites such as Guhyeshwari (see Nearby Attractions), Swayambhunath, and Changu Narayan. This mandala-based understanding of space influenced how Newar communities organized pilgrimage circuits, festival routes, and settlement patterns — and it still underlies devotional maps and pilgrimage guides produced today, distinct from the trigonometrical surveys that would arrive centuries later with European visitors.

Malla-era court chronicles (the source material behind texts like the Gopal Raj Vamshavali) also describe settlement boundaries, royal land grants, and locations of shrines in relation to named landmarks — again, geography by description rather than by drawn map. It would take the arrival of European missions to the Kathmandu Valley to produce the first maps in the modern cartographic sense.

1793: Kirkpatrick’s Mission and the First Published Map of the Valley

The first documented cartographic attempt to map the Kathmandu Valley — and by extension, Pashupatinath’s general location within it — is tied to Colonel William Kirkpatrick’s 1793 mission to Nepal on behalf of the British East India Company. Kirkpatrick’s visit followed several earlier, failed British attempts to establish relations with the Kathmandu court, including Captain George Kinloch’s disastrous 1767 expedition and a series of diplomatic missions in the 1770s and 1780s.

Kirkpatrick’s resulting book, An Account of the Kingdom of Nepaul (published 1811, based on his 1793 visit), was illustrated with a map — commonly referenced as the “Map of the Valley of Nepaul” — showing the valley’s cities of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, its rivers (including the Bagmati and Bishnumati), and surrounding mountains, at a scale of roughly 1¼ inches to the mile for the valley itself. This is generally regarded as the first Western-produced map to render the Kathmandu Valley’s internal geography in any detail, and by extension the first to place Pashupatinath and the settlement of Deopatan within a scaled, surveyed context rather than a purely descriptive one.

It’s worth noting that Kirkpatrick’s mission, like the British missions that followed, was diplomatically unsuccessful — he failed to establish a permanent British residency in Kathmandu — but his book and its accompanying map remained the standard Western reference on Nepal’s geography for decades afterward.

The Early-to-Mid 1800s: Hodgson, Buchanan-Hamilton, and Oldfield

Following Kirkpatrick, several other British residents and visitors contributed to the valley’s cartographic and topographic record:

• Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, whose botanical and geographical survey expeditions produced detailed route and camp maps of missions travelling to and from Kathmandu, correlating his botanical collection sites with specific locations in the valley — maps rare enough that only two sets are known to survive today, one in the British Library.
• Brian Houghton Hodgson, the British Resident in Kathmandu for much of the early-to-mid 19th century, whose extensive documentation of Nepal’s geography, natural history, and religious sites fed into later published accounts of the valley, though he is more widely known for his ethnographic and naturalist work than for standalone maps.
• Henry Ambrose Oldfield, a British Residency surgeon in Kathmandu in the mid-19th century, whose sketches of temples, settlements, and valley topography — including areas around Swayambhu and the broader Kathmandu basin — provide some of the most detailed visual records of the valley’s built and natural landscape from this period, complementing formal survey work with illustrated topographic detail.

Together, this period’s contributions moved the valley’s cartographic record from a single published map (Kirkpatrick’s) toward a denser accumulation of sketches, routes, and topographic notes — much of it produced by British Residency staff who, restricted from travelling freely through the rest of Nepal, focused their observational energy on the Kathmandu Valley itself.

1877: Daniel Wright’s History of Nepal and Its Illustrated Plates

In 1877, Daniel Wright, a British Residency surgeon, published History of Nepal — a translation of the Vamshavali (genealogical chronicle) from the Parbatiya language, prefaced by his own extended introductory sketch of the country’s geography, people, and customs based on ten years of residence. The book is illustrated with sixteen plates and includes sketch material depicting valley landmarks, among them views connected to Swayambhu and the broader Kathmandu basin.

While Wright’s book is, as several modern reviewers have pointed out, more a compilation of Newar chronicle history and 19th-century British observation than a rigorous cartographic survey, it remains one of the most frequently cited 19th-century English-language sources for the valley’s historical geography — and its plates are still reproduced in academic and popular accounts of the valley’s 19th-century appearance, including areas around Pashupatinath and Deopatan. Digitized copies of the original 1877 edition are held by the Internet Archive and several university and heritage-mapping libraries.

1924–1934: The Survey of India and Nepal’s First Modern Topographic Map

The most significant leap in Pashupatinath’s cartographic context came in the early 20th century. In December 1923, Britain and Nepal signed a treaty of perpetual peace and friendship, and the following year, Maharaja Chandra Shamsher Jung Bahadur Rana requested the assistance of the Survey of India in producing a modern trigonometrical and topographical map of the entire kingdom — with the specific condition that only Indian surveyors, not British ones, be used for the fieldwork, since foreign nationals were still largely barred from travelling within Nepal at the time.

The resulting 1934 Survey of India map of Nepal is widely regarded as the first modern, scientifically surveyed map of the country as a whole, superseding the patchwork of British expedition sketches and route maps that had accumulated over the preceding 140 years. While this map covered all of Nepal rather than Pashupatinath specifically, it placed the temple and Deopatan settlement within a nationally consistent, trigonometrically accurate framework for the first time — a foundational shift from descriptive and route-based mapping toward true topographic surveying.

Mid-20th Century: Cadastral Mapping and Nepal’s Own Survey Department

Following the end of Rana rule in 1951 and the loosening of restrictions on foreign travel and domestic administration, Nepal began building its own mapping infrastructure. Nepal’s Survey Department, under what eventually became the Ministry of Land Management, took on responsibility for systematic topographic and cadastral (land-parcel) mapping across the country, including the rapidly urbanizing Kathmandu Valley.

For Pashupatinath specifically, this period matters because it produced the first detailed cadastral maps — land-parcel-level surveys distinguishing guthi (trust) land, temple property, cremation ghats, and private settlement boundaries in Deopatan — the same kind of land-tenure clarity that would later prove essential when UNESCO and PADT needed to define exact monument-zone and buffer-zone boundaries. This is also the period in which aerial photography began supplementing ground survey work across the valley, a precursor to today’s satellite-based mapping.

1979 Onward: UNESCO Inscription and the Pashupati Monument Zone Maps

Pashupatinath’s inscription as part of the Kathmandu Valley UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 — detailed on our UNESCO World Heritage page — introduced an entirely new category of map: the formal monument-zone boundary map, required by UNESCO’s own documentation and monitoring standards.

The Kathmandu Valley property is inscribed as seven separate monument zones, one of which is the Pashupati Monument Zone. In 2006, following concerns raised by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee about unregulated urban development encroaching on the valley’s monument zones, Nepal’s government and UNESCO’s advisory bodies (notably ICOMOS) produced a formal set of maps titled “Pashupati Monument Zone: Proposed Redefinition of Core and Buffer Zone Boundary,” alongside equivalent redefinition maps for the other six monument zones (Hanuman Dhoka, Patan, Bhaktapur, Swayambhu, Bauddhanath, and Changu Narayan). These maps remain part of the official documentary record held by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and are periodically referenced in the property’s ongoing State of Conservation reports.

Around the same period, independent scholarly fieldwork produced some of the most detailed maps of the Pashupati area’s internal layout ever made. Notably, the German scholar Axel Michaels, working with Nepali researcher Govinda Tandon across fieldwork periods from 1982 onward, produced detailed spatial documentation of the Pashupati area’s shrines, ghats, and structures — published in Michaels’ Die Reisen der Götter: Der nepalische Pashupatinātha Tempel und sein rituelles Umfeld (1994) and later expanded in Tandon’s own two-volume study of the Pashupati Area (1996 and 1999). These maps, capturing the spatial situation of the early 1990s, remain a key academic reference point for understanding how the site’s physical layout has (and hasn’t) changed since.

2000s–Present: PADT Master Plans and Institutional Mapping

The Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT), established in 1986 under the Pashupati Area Development Trust Act, 2044 (1987), is the institution primarily responsible for present-day mapping and zoning decisions within the Pashupati area. A conceptual master plan was first approved by Nepal’s government in 2053 B.S. (roughly 1996–97 CE), and PADT has since developed and revised further master plans — including a more recent plan focused on protecting Licchavi-era inscriptions, managing guthi land, and formalizing conservation zoning across the wider Pashupati area, which the country’s Department of Archaeology recognizes as one of the valley’s most significant archaeological zones.

These master-plan maps typically define zoning categories (core heritage zone, buffer zone, development-restricted zone), locate scheduled monuments and inscriptions, and coordinate with UNESCO’s own monument-zone boundaries — making them functionally the direct institutional descendants of the 2006 UNESCO redefinition maps described above, adapted for domestic planning and infrastructure decisions (including, notably, a proposed Tilganga–Tamranganga tunnel road project through the monument zone that was ultimately cancelled following conservation concerns).

Today: Satellite Imagery, GIS, and Digital Maps

The most recent chapter in Pashupatinath’s cartographic history requires no surveyor on the ground at all. Platforms such as Google Earth, OpenStreetMap, and Esri/ArcGIS now provide continuously updated satellite and aerial imagery of the entire Pashupati complex, the Bagmati ghats, and the surrounding Deopatan settlement — searchable, zoomable, and geolocated to the temple’s coordinates (approximately 27.7097°N, 85.3486°E).

These digital tools serve several practical purposes that no historical map ever could: real-time comparison of the site’s footprint over time (useful for tracking post-2015-earthquake reconstruction, discussed on our Earthquake Restoration page), route-planning for pilgrims and travelers (see our Travel Guide), and open geographic data that researchers, journalists, and heritage-monitoring organizations use to track encroachment or land-use change around the monument zone boundary. In effect, the site has moved from being described in scripture, to being drawn by hand, to being surveyed with instruments, to being imaged continuously from orbit — each layer still legible underneath the one that followed it.

Comparing the Maps: What Has Changed, and What Hasn’t

Placing these maps side by side — scriptural geography, Kirkpatrick’s 1793 sketch, the 1934 Survey of India sheet, and today’s satellite imagery — makes it possible to trace both continuity and change across more than two centuries of documented cartography:

• The temple’s core position has not moved. Every map from Kirkpatrick’s 1793 survey onward places the main pagoda in essentially the same location relative to the Bagmati River, consistent with the temple’s own architectural history of repeated reconstruction on the same foundation rather than relocation (see Temple Complex).
• The surrounding settlement has grown dramatically. Where 19th-century maps show Deopatan as a relatively compact settlement bordered by open farmland and forest, 20th- and 21st-century maps — and especially satellite imagery — show near-continuous urban development extending from central Kathmandu out toward the monument zone, the exact encroachment pattern that prompted UNESCO’s 2003 “danger list” concerns and the 2006 boundary redefinition described above.
• The number of shrines and structures mapped has expanded. Early maps focus almost entirely on the main temple; later academic mapping (particularly Michaels and Tandon’s 1980s–90s fieldwork) documents the full extent of the site’s roughly 500 individual temples, shrines, and monuments — reflecting both better survey methods and a more complete accounting of the wider Pashupati area’s religious geography over time.
• The Bagmati River’s course and the ghats along it are the most consistently documented feature. From Kirkpatrick’s earliest sketch through today’s GIS platforms, the river and its cremation ghats — Aryaghat foremost among them — appear on nearly every map of the site, a reflection of their unbroken ritual importance across every era covered on this page.

Why This Cartographic Record Matters

Read together, this sequence of maps tells a story that runs parallel to — and helps corroborate — the political and religious history covered on our Temple Timeline page. Scriptural geography established why this specific riverbank mattered. Licchavi-era inscriptions established the earliest physical boundaries of temple land. Malla-era Nepal Mandala cosmology placed the site within a symbolic map of the valley’s sacred order. Kirkpatrick’s 1793 survey placed it, for the first time, on a scaled Western map. The 1934 Survey of India map placed it within a nationally consistent trigonometric framework. UNESCO’s 2006 boundary maps and PADT’s master plans formalized its legal protection. And today’s satellite platforms keep that record current in real time.

This layering also explains why historical accounts of the site’s exact boundaries or internal layout sometimes differ between sources: pre-20th-century maps were produced under very different technical constraints, political access restrictions, and surveying standards than the maps used today — a pattern of source variation consistent with the documentary gaps discussed on our History and Origin pages.

Frequently Asked Questions

Suggested Images for This Page

(Sourced externally; confirm licensing/permissions before publishing. Swap in higher-resolution scans where available, consistent with this guide’s placeholder-image convention.)

1. Kirkpatrick’s 1793/1811 “Map of the Valley of Nepaul” — reference copies discussed via Geographicus Rare Antique Maps and the Kathmandu Post’s “The First Map of Nepal” feature.
2. 1934 Survey of India map of Nepal — reference listing and scan preview via Geographicus Rare Antique Maps (“1934 Survey of India Map of Nepal — 1st modern map of Nepal”).
3. Plates from Daniel Wright’s 1877 History of Nepal — full digitized scans available via the Internet Archive.
4. UNESCO 2006 Pashupati Monument Zone core/buffer boundary map — official document listing on the UNESCO World Heritage Centre’s Kathmandu Valley documents page (whc.unesco.org).
5. Modern satellite/aerial view of the Pashupatinath complex and Bagmati ghats — Esri/OpenStreetMap composite imagery, or Google Earth.

Where to Go Next

• Temple Timeline — the full chronological political and religious history behind these maps
• Origin — the mythological and earliest historical roots of the site
• UNESCO World Heritage — full detail on the 1979 designation and the 2006 boundary redefinition
• Archaeology and Ancient Records — the inscriptional evidence behind the site’s early boundaries
• Temple Map — a practical, present-day map for visitors
• Temple Complex — how this cartographic history shaped the site’s present-day layout
• Research Papers, Books, and Sanskrit References — primary and scholarly sources behind this page

This entry is part of our About Pashupatinath guide, covering the essential facts, history, mythology, and rituals of Pashupatinath Temple.

Sources & Citations

1. Kirkpatrick, William. An Account of the Kingdom of Nepaul. London, 1811 (based on 1793 mission). Referenced via Geographicus Rare Antique Maps and Kathmandu Post, “The First Map of Nepal” (Dec. 30, 2017).
2. Wright, Daniel. History of Nepal. Cambridge, 1877. Digitized edition: Internet Archive, archive.org/details/historyofnepaldanielwright1877_9_V.
3. Geographicus Rare Antique Maps. “1934 Survey of India Map of Nepal (1st modern map of Nepal).” geographicus.com.
4. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Kathmandu Valley — Documents” (includes 2006 Pashupati Monument Zone core/buffer boundary redefinition map). whc.unesco.org/en/list/121/documents.
5. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. State of Conservation report, Kathmandu Valley (2013). whc.unesco.org/en/soc/1901.
6. Pashupati Area Development Trust Act, 2044 (1987). Nepal Archives, nepalarchives.com.
7. Michaels, Axel. Die Reisen der Götter: Der nepalische Pashupatinātha Tempel und sein rituelles Umfeld. 1994 (fieldwork with Govinda Tandon from 1982 onward); Tandon, Govinda. Pashupati Area (2 vols.), 1996 and 1999. Referenced via Exotic India Art, “Pasupatiksetra (A Historical Inventory).”
8. Nepal News. “Master Plan for Preparations on Development of Pashupati Area.” nepalnews.com.
9. The Annapurna Express. “Plan to Project Pashupatinath Power Planet-Wide.”
10. Wikipedia. “Bhuikhel,” “Pashupati Area Development Trust,” “Pashupatinath Temple,” “History of Kathmandu,” “Kathmandu Valley” — consulted for cross-referencing dates and administrative details.
11. Britannica. “Pashupatinath Temple | History, Description, & Facts.”
12. Linnean Society. “December 2013: Maps of Nepal” (Buchanan-Hamilton expedition maps).

Note: This page consolidates publicly available historical, institutional, and academic sources. Dates and attributions for pre-20th-century maps vary between sources, consistent with the documentary gaps described throughout this guide’s History section; where sources disagree, this page presents the most commonly cited account rather than resolving the discrepancy.

The Pashupatinath is an independent devotional and cultural resource. It is not the official website of the Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT) or the Government of Nepal. For official temple notices, consult PADT directly.