Langtang after 10 years

05 April 2025

Sonia Awale

Gyalbu Tamang had spent the night in Langtang village for a prayer vigil, and was on his way back to his home in Kyanjin, three hours up the valley.

It started drizzling, and he took shelter at a friend’s place. Just before noon as tea was being served, the ground shook violently. It was strangely dark, large lumps of snow started falling like in a blizzard.

Tamang knew it was a big earthquake, and rushed on to Kyanjin to see if his two daughters were safe. His heart sank when he looked down from a bluff overlooking the village. His house and much of the monastic town were piles of rubble and ice.

His daughters had been taught in school to take cover in an earthquake, and this saved them when it hit. Tamang's sister Sumjo was outside and blown off by the blast. When she came to, she could not move because of a broken leg and her baby daughter had been thrown away but safe.

As a boy, Gyalbu Tamang learnt cheesemaking from his father who was trained by the Swiss in the 1950s.

Tamang then ran back down to Langtang where the rest of his extended family lived. He passed people fleeing in the opposite direction who said there was nothing left of Langtang. His parents, sisters and their families were all buried by the avalanche.

“If I had not left that morning, I would have been dead too,” says Tamang, now 49.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake unleashed an avalanche from Mt Langtang Lirung (7,234m) that bulldozed a glacier, burying the village below in debris 100m deep.

At least 310 people were killed, 80 of them international trekkers. Most were never found, some were blown off by the shock wave to the other side of the valley. Langtang village was wiped off the map.

Tamang returned to the Langtang Cheese Production Centre which he heads. It was set up in the 1950s by the Swiss, and now run by the government’s Dairy Development Cooperation (DDC).

The factory was flattened by the earthquake. What was left of the equipment, raw material and 150kg of cheese in the storeroom were destroyed. Of the yak herders who supplied milk to the plant, 22 had been killed and 700 of their yaks.

Langtang's survivors, including Tamang’s family, were evacuated to Phuntsok Choeling Monastery in Kathmandu for safety as aftershocks rattled Langtang.

That was where Tamang reconnected with film-maker Kesang Tseten, who was so moved by the tales of survivors who had lost family members, that he made his award-winning documentary Trembling Mountain.

“I wasn’t initially thinking of making a film, however, the story started unfolding itself,” recalls Tseten.

Trembling Mountain became not just the story of the rebirth of Langtang but also about its yak herders and cheese makers who had lost their livelihood.

“Mountain people struck by disaster with the tangible goal of rebuilding a cheese factory was a metaphor for the community getting back on its feet,” Tseten explains.

The film crew visited Langtang five times over the next year, trekking across trails made treacherous by landslides and rockfalls. The Nepal Army was still recovering bodies, and Kesang filmed a masked Gyalbu Tamang chanting with prayer beads as he identified the decomposed bodies of relatives.

After watching the film, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in Kathmandu helped rebuild the cheese plant.

Gyalbu Tamang’s father was one of the first cheese makers trained by the Swiss 70 years ago, and he grew up milking yaks in high pasture and learning the art of cheese-making which he is now passing on to a younger generation.

Trembling Mountain also prompted the DDC to raise the buying rate of yak milk from Rs70 per litre to Rs100.

The Langtang cheese factory survived a catastrophic earthquake and was rebuilt, but ten years later its very existence is in doubt again because the herders are getting older and the youth have migrated. It is also too expensive to rear yaks.

Read also: Langtang revives its cheese heritage, Gyalbu Tamang

Langtang Cheese Production Centre was set up by the Swiss 70 years ago, and was destroyed in the 2015 disaster (left). It was rebuilt after the earthquake (right) but has been impacted by dwindling yak herders.

“Even a cup of black tea costs Rs120, so why would yak herders do such hard work?” asks Tamang, who was in Kathmandu this week to lobby with the DDC to increase the price of milk.

The number of herders supplying milk to the cheese plant has come down from 36 to five. Some of the yaks are already being bought by other cheese factories down the valley or in Gatlang.

Langtang cheese has strong brand value, and Tamang hopes that a private investor will be interested. This would not just revive the dairy business, but also the cultural heritage associated with yak herding that is in decline.

The climate crisis has added to the problem. Less snow in winter affects grass in spring, leading to lower nutrition levels in yaks and less fat content in their milk.

This has a direct impact on cheese production at the factory, which has fallen to 2,300kg per season from a high of 7,000kg when Tamang’s father Pasang Norbu used to head the plant.

“My father had 15 yaks himself, and he bought more with his retirement money so that his children would continue to be in the dairy business,” says Tamang. “My son is in Grade 6 in Kathmandu, and I hope he grows up to be a cheese maker too.”

In the 10 years after the earthquake and avalanche, Kyanjin has become the new tourism hub with 46 lodges and has been dubbed ‘Thamel on the Mountain’.

Karma Tamang, a lodge owner in Kyanjin whose relatives also perished, told us in 2021 that perhaps the earthquake was punishment to people of the valley for becoming too money-minded and greedy.

“Back then immediately after the earthquake, many of us said that we have to fall back on religion again. After all, we cannot take anything with us when we die.”

Besides cheesemaking, Gyalbu Tamang owns a small lodge in Kyanjin. He says, “That feeling is long gone, people are back to their old ways. Trekkers have returned, it is business as usual, and there is envy and competition.”

Cheesemaking for beginners

Technically, yak cheese is a misnomer. Yaks are male, and the female is a nak. There are also specialised names like zopkyo or dzom depending on whether they are male or female crossbred with cattle.

Nepalis, even in the highlands, do not traditionally eat cheese, but do turn surplus yak milk into churpi, a hard cheese with a long shelf life. It was the Swiss 70 years ago who wished to make Nepal in their image and introduce cheese making to places like Langtang and Jiri.

The yak cheese production window is between March to November. Langtang Cheese Production Centre staff travel to high pastures up to 5,000m with their yaks. Yala has the highest quality milk as yaks graze on lush grass, yarsagumba and panchaunle in the spring season. When they have grazed on one slope, they move on to the next.

At camp, the milk is boiled to 65°C using firewood already stacked up during the off-season. The milk is then cooled to 35°C and the fat content brought down to 3.5-3.6% from 6.5-7%.

Once the mixture attains the required fat content, an enzyme is added at about 32°C and left for five minutes after which the milk turns jelly-like. For the next 15 minutes, the smaller pieces are stirred in the vat by slowly increasing the temperature up to 52°C. At this point, the fire is stopped, but manual stirring continues for the next hour.

Next, the curd is separated using cheesecloth every few minutes throughout the night, and filled into circular moulds. The whey byproduct is traditionally used as a home remedy for gastritis.

The cheese disks are transported down to the factory in Kyanjin and dipped in salt water for 48 hours and then stored in racks for three months. They are moistened with salt water every once in a while before the cheese disks ripen.

Today, churpi has become popular in Europe and the US as dog chew, and last year Nepal exported nearly 1,000 tonnes of dog chew worth $90 million to the United States.