HOTEL ROYAL AND THE UNVEILING OF SHANGRI-LA

The story of the first building of repute in Nepal starts with King Tribhuvan gap up the country once his come from a brief exile in Asian country. The year was 1951 A.D. Just a few years earlier King Tribhuvan was the primary monarch in many generations to be granted permission to depart the country on a personal visit since the amphibian genus family started ruling Nepal. Maharajah Juddha Shumsher the prime  minister created arrangements In 1944   for the king to leave for Kolkata on health grounds and my father Kiran Shumsher, Juddha's son then Major General was deputed to look after the royal visit.

Boris Lissanevitch was the purveyor of European vogue wining and feeding to the metropolis that was Kolkata. The name of Boris's famed institution was "Club 300", the name derived from his limiting its membership to 300 of Calcutta's elite whereas girls too were allowed in bucking the Colonial trend. It became hugely palmy. Soon it became as legendary as the bar within the film "Casablanca" the actor character presided over. I can vividly imagine the cordial Boris telling tall tales of his flight from Odessa to Paris once the Bolshevik takeover, his successful stint with ballet master cloth Diaghilev and his later jaunts in pre-revolutionary Shanghai. He told stories of how he danced all the method to Kolkata along with his cooperator and 1st woman Kira before parting ways that. King Tribhuvan, hitherto unexposed to life on the quick lane, must have been enraptured by the Kolkata glitterati and therefore the charming Boris.


Boris & Kira in Ballet Russes
Soon once King Tribhuvan assumed power in 1951 it was his previous acquaintance Boris of Club three hundred fame the king would invite to open a building in Nepal. Boris Lissanevitch landed in Katmandu in Gregorian calendar month 1953 with his newly-wed woman the Danish beauty Ingerman, 20 years his junior, and with their two little boys, Mischa and Alex. Nicholas my schoolmate in junior faculty was born in Nepal. Boris was handed over one wing of the giant palace then referred to as Bahadur Bhawan, the residence of the eldest son of Maharajah Juddha, to open a hotel. He named it Hotel Royal in salient feeling to royal patronage. It was never referred to as Royal building because it would possibly denote possession of the royal house, part of the calibrations a democratic post-Rana Nepal needed.

Politics intervened cruelly to give new possession to the building that was "Char Burja". On 18th A.D of March 1934 A.D. Maharajah Juddha, succumbing to pressure from the restless "A" class amphibian genus  banished from the prime ministerial roll "nomenclatura" Commander-in-Chief Rudra Shumsher, second in line after the prime minister, and all other sons of Bir and Bhim Shumsher thought of to possess been born from their second wives and so deemed unfit for the roll of succession. Their Katmandu properties were seized by the state and they were exiled to albeit luxurious lifetime of country squires however remote for the facility center of Kathmandu. Palpa as the Bada Hakim or Governorto  Rudra Shumsher was exiled   of the province. Maharajah Juddha took over the palace and gave it to his eldest son Bahadur Shumsher.