1 From court politics to the Rana order

The Rana regime was produced by a single decade of factional violence. Mathbar Singh Thapa's fall and assassination removed the strongest Thapa house; the queen's faction, the Pandes and the Basnyats exhausted one another in the years that followed; and Jang Bahadur Kunwar, who had learned the court's methods from inside it, used the Kot massacre of 1846 to clear his rivals and to have himself appointed prime minister with control of the army and the post of commander-in-chief. The offices were made hereditary in his family in 1857, which converted a prime ministership into a dynasty.