Sherpa

The Sherpa are a Tibetan people of the high Himalaya, centred on the Khumbu and Solu valleys of eastern Nepal beneath Mount Everest. Their name joins the Tibetan words shar, meaning east, and pa, meaning people, and recalls an origin in Kham in eastern Tibet.

Oral history derives them from four clans who left Kham in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, travelled through Ü and Tsang and crossed into the Himalayan valleys; those clans later split into more than twenty groups. By the 1400s the Khumbu Sherpa managed their own affairs within the emerging Nepali state.

They speak Sherpa, a southern Tibeto-Burman language coloured by Khams Tibetan dialects, and follow Tibetan Buddhism, maintaining monasteries called gompas above their villages alongside older Bon traditions.