Khumjung School
Project details
Khumjung School was the first school Sir Edmund Hillary built in Solukhumbu, and the beginning of the aid work that became the Himalayan Trust. The idea was born in October 1960 when, crossing the Tashi Laptsa pass, the Sherpa Urkien answered Ed Hillary's question about what his village most needed: "We would like a school for our children."
Khumjung, Urkien's home village, became the site. A prefabricated aluminium building made in Calcutta was flown in to the Mingbo airstrip and erected as the Khumjung school in June 1961.
Khumjung School opened in 1961 as the first school of the Himalayan Trust. It was built from prefabricated aluminium sections that were flown to a rough airstrip at Mingbo and carried the rest of the way to the village. It was among the highest schools in the world.
Requests from other villages for their own schools followed almost immediately. By the end of the decade the Trust had built schools in Khumjung, Pangboche, Thame, Tengboche and Phortse. Khumjung's school grew with its village: a carpentry shed in 1965, two classrooms in 1968, a handicraft room in 1970, and a classroom and hostel in 1979. In 1982 it became a high school, with new classrooms added in 1984. Some of its first pupils became teachers there.
Pupils have come a long way to be there. Kami Temba, who grew up below Thame, walked five hours each way to Khumjung School and went on to become a doctor and then the doctor in charge at Khunde Hospital.
Today the school is Khumjung Secondary School, with roughly 270 students from early childhood to Grade 10. They come from Khumjung and from Pangboche, Phortse, Thame and Namche, and some board in a Trust-supported hostel. The primary schools at Phortse and Pangboche merged into it in 2024 and 2025. In 2024 a Khumjung student, Khamsu Ongdu Sherpa, topped the entire Solukhumbu district in Nepal's national school-leaving exams.
By 2018 the school had grown into a large modern campus and the original 1961 classroom stood empty. The community and Himalayan Trust Nepal agreed to turn it into a museum of the school, the village and the Trust. It opened to the public on 29 May 2023, and its ticket income helps fund the school. By its handover to the School Management Committee on 7 November 2025 it had welcomed more than 3,000 visitors.