Nepal, June 27 -- The schoolteacher walked ahead of me through the terraced hillside above Dullu in the west of Nepal, and paused where the path crests a small rise to gesture at a clearing below. We descended together into it.

There was one standing wall, sun-bleached, cracked along its upper courses, listing slightly as though exhausted, rising from weeds and what looked, from a distance, like piled rubble. This was all that remained of the Dullu Darbar, a palace built in the 1920s by artisans from Kathmandu on the site of the old Malla royal compound - centuries earlier it was the winter seat of Khas-Malla kingship.

"It burnt for several days," the teacher said. "You could see smoke from several villages away. Nobody came. Nobody st...