Hidden Nepal

Stories that explain Nepal through the people who remember them.

By Abhay Gautam
Editor, Cold Feet

Published on 2 July 2026 · 8 min read

There are places that introduce themselves with mountains.

Myanglung chooses a cat.

After a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Sidhuwa Bazaar in Dhankuta, the bus finally rolled into the district headquarters of Tehrathum. I expected the familiar landmarks of a hill town: a bus park, a row of small shops, perhaps a temple announcing the centre of the settlement. Instead, I was greeted by a giant stone cat sitting above the highway, calmly watching the town unfold beneath it.

It is impossible not to look up.

The sculpture has an expression that is difficult to describe without smiling. It doesn't appear fierce or majestic. If anything, it looks faintly amused, as though it has spent years watching travellers arrive, stare for a few seconds, reach for their cameras, and ask the same inevitable question.

Why is there a giant cat in the middle of Myanglung?

That question followed me throughout the day.

Between meetings, I asked shopkeepers, drivers and anyone willing to indulge a curious outsider. Everyone knew there was a story. Everyone had heard it from someone older. Yet every version seemed to differ by a small detail. Some remembered only fragments, while others confidently filled the gaps with their own interpretations.

That, I realised, is how oral traditions survive. They do not remain unchanged. They remain alive.

By the evening, someone suggested I speak with one of the town's elderly residents, a man known for his knowledge of local history and folklore. When I asked him about the cat, he smiled before answering, almost as though he had been expecting the question all along.

"It is an old story," he said. "You can choose for yourself whether to believe it or not. I believe it from my heart."

Then he began.

Long before roads reached these hills, every journey into eastern Nepal happened on foot. Salt, grain, cloth and everyday necessities travelled the mountain trails on the backs of porters, who spent days walking between the plains and the highlands.

One evening, three of those porters arrived near present-day Myanglung as daylight was fading. Rather than continue through the forest after dark, they stopped at a chautari beneath a large peepal tree.

For centuries, chautaris were an essential part of life in Nepal's hills. Built beneath broad-canopied trees, they offered shade to travellers, a place for porters to lower their loads, and a meeting point where stories, news and gossip moved from one valley to the next. Long before roads connected these mountains, chautaris connected the people who crossed them.

The three men gathered a few white stones to build a simple hearth beneath the tree. One arranged the stones into a circle, placed firewood beneath a cooking pot and lit the fire.

As the flames grew, one of the stones shifted by itself. 

The porter, exhausted after days of walking, assumed it had become unstable. Irritated, he struck the stone with his Khukuri.

It meowed.

Then it began to bleed.

The three porters abandoned everything and fled into the darkness.

When villagers visited the chautari the following morning, they found the stone marked with fresh blood where the blade had fallen. The story spread quickly through the settlement. People believed the wounded stone continued to meow during the night, unsettling the village and filling it with fear. As the legend grew, so too did stories of strange misfortunes that no one could explain.

The turning point came through a dream.

One villager claimed that a goddess had appeared before him, weeping beside the wounded stone. She asked that it be worshipped rather than feared. The villagers accepted the dream as a sign, carefully placed the stone upon a larger rock and began offering prayers. According to local tradition, the meowing ceased, the village found peace again, and the place gradually came to be known as Myanglung—from the Limbu words myaau, meaning cat, and lung, meaning stone.

Whether that is the historical origin of the town's name is difficult to verify today. What is beyond question is that the story has become inseparable from the identity of the place.

The old chautari no longer stands. Today, the Meyanglung God Temple occupies the very site where the three porters are believed to have rested beneath the peepal tree. At the entrance, another stone cat emerges from a split boulder, one paw raised as though greeting those who arrive. Behind it, devotees continue to offer prayers, bells sway gently in the mountain breeze, and incense drifts through a shrine that remains very much a part of everyday life rather than a monument to a forgotten past.

It is a remarkably quiet place.

Visitors arrive with folded hands. Some come seeking blessings. Others come because their parents once brought them here, and their grandparents before them. Whether they are honouring history, faith or family tradition hardly seems to matter. The story continues because the community continues to carry it.

Standing there, it became clear that the giant cat in the middle of town is not simply a roadside landmark but the beginning of a conversation.

Travel has a habit of teaching us to search for history in monuments, museums and carefully dated plaques. Nepal often tells its history differently. Here, some of the most enduring narratives survive because someone remembers them well enough to tell them again. They pass from grandparents to grandchildren, from an elder sitting outside a teashop to a traveller asking too many questions, from a chautari beneath a peepal tree to a temple that now stands in its place.

When I returned home and mentioned the story to my grandfather, he listened patiently before correcting one small detail.

"No," he said. "The stone didn't bleed first."

"It meowed."

I have no way of knowing whether that was the version his grandfather told him, or whether somewhere along the journey another storyteller decided that a meow before the wound made the tale more memorable. That uncertainty feels entirely appropriate. Oral traditions are not preserved because every word remains identical. They endure because every generation believes the story is worth telling again.

The cat still watches over Myanglung.

It still wears that wonderfully self-satisfied expression, as though it knows something the rest of us have yet to understand.

Perhaps it does.

If your travels ever bring you to the hills of eastern Nepal, stop for a while beneath its gaze. Walk to the temple where the old chautari once stood. Listen to the story from whoever is willing to tell it, because chances are their version will differ, however slightly, from the one you have just read.

That is not a flaw in the legend.

It is the reason it is still alive.