Introduction
Bhaktapur's mesocosm was built out of the materials available to it. In this chapter we will review something of the long history that helped form the present city, and out of whose debris it tried to build a seemingly timeless structure. That history, in turn, was much affected by the setting of the Kathmandu Valley—temperate, relatively disease-free compared to the southern jungles between Nepal and India, isolated and closed in by southern hills and those jungles to the south and by the Himalayas to the north, and with an enormously fertile soil, the essential support for the civilization that came to flourish there.