VANITY FAIR Features Kathmandu

Sacred History Resonates in Kathmandu: Traditional building practices coexist with global trade in Nepal's capital

“All the scholarship in the world could not match the living heritage of people who know how to carve in this way—people, furthermore, who actually care which god goes where.” - Lucinda Lambton, Vanity Fair

Decades of restoration have kept up the medieval splendor of a region long hidden from the world: Kathmandu Valley. Started by Germany in the 1960s and later spearheaded by a Harvard professor, the repairs have maintained many of the area's stupas and pagodas, Lucinda Lambton writes for Vanity Fair—but one must visit to see how the architecture infuses the sacred in the everyday.

“And what a noise," Lambton writes. "With prayer bells ringing, carpenters chiseling, metalworkers hammering, horns tooting, loudspeakers blaring, people shrieking and chattering, food sizzling. What other great historic urban space is there in the world that has flung itself so wholeheartedly into modern life while retaining its spiritual soul and stately beauty?” Harry Kimball

You can find the Vanity Fair article in: (7 pages, with color photographs)

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/09/kathmandu200809

Photo: http://www.nepalpackagetour.com/kathmandu.htm