Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom
An interesting article by By SETH MYDANS
The original at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia/07bhutan.html?ref=world
THIMPHU, Bhutan — If the rest of the world cannot get it right in these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains says it is working on an answer.
“Greed, insatiable human greed,” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of today’s economic catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. “What we need is change,” he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works. “We need to think gross national happiness.”
The notion of gross national happiness was the inspiration of the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s as an alternative to the gross national product. Now, the Bhutanese are refining the country’s guiding philosophy into what they see as a new political science, and it has ripened into government policy just when the world may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and communications.
“You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up in,” he said, referring to the global economic crisis. “Industrialized societies have decided now that G.N.P. is a broken promise.”
Under a new Constitution adopted last year, government programs — from agriculture to transportation to foreign trade — must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce.
The goal is not happiness itself, the prime minister explained, a concept that each person must define for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he called, in an updated version of the American Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of gross national happiness.”
The Bhutanese have started with an experiment within an experiment, accepting the resignation of the popular king as an absolute monarch and holding the country’s first democratic election a year ago.
The change is part of attaining gross national happiness, Mr. Dorji said. “They resonate well, democracy and G.N.H. Both place responsibility on the individual. Happiness is an individual pursuit and democracy is the empowerment of the individual.”
It was a rare case of a monarch’s unilaterally stepping back from power, and an even rarer case of his doing so against the wishes of his subjects. He gave the throne to his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who was crowned in November in the new role of constitutional monarch without executive power.
Bhutan is, perhaps, an easy place to nimbly rewrite economic rules — a country with one airport and two commercial planes, where the east can only be reached from the west after four days’ travel on mountain roads.
No more than 700,000 people live in the kingdom, squeezed between the world’s two most populous nations, India and China, and its task now is to control and manage the inevitable changes to its way of life. It is a country where cigarettes are banned and television was introduced just 10 years ago, where traditional clothing and architecture are enforced by law and where the capital city has no stoplight and just one traffic officer on duty.
If the world is to take gross national happiness seriously, the Bhutanese concede, they must work out a scheme of definitions and standards that can be quantified and measured by the big players of the world’s economy.
“Once Bhutan said, ‘O.K., here we are with G.N.H.,’ the developed world and the World Bank and the I.M.F. and so on asked, ‘How do you measure it?’ ” Mr. Dorji said, characterizing the reactions of the world’s big economic players. So the Bhutanese produced an intricate model of well-being that features the four pillars, the nine domains and the 72 indicators of happiness.
Specifically, the government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index.
All of this is to be analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration as well as suicidal thoughts.
“We are even breaking down the time of day: how much time a person spends with family, at work and so on,” Mr. Dorji said.
Mathematical formulas have even been devised to reduce happiness to its tiniest component parts. The G.N.H. index for psychological well-being, for example, includes the following: “One sum of squared distances from cutoffs for four psychological well-being indicators. Here, instead of average the sum of squared distances from cutoffs is calculated because the weights add up to 1 in each dimension.”
This is followed by a set of equations:
= 1-(.25+.03125+.000625+0)
= 1-.281875
= .718
Every two years, these indicators are to be reassessed through a nationwide questionnaire, said Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, as he sat in his office at the end of a hard day of work that he said made him happy.
Gross national happiness has a broader application for Bhutan as it races to preserve its identity and culture from the encroachments of the outside world.
“How does a small country like Bhutan handle globalization?” Mr. Dorji asked. “We will survive by being distinct, by being different.”
Bhutan is pitting its four pillars, nine domains and 72 indicators against the 48 channels of Hollywood and Bollywood that have invaded since television was permitted a decade ago.
“Before June 1999 if you asked any young person who is your hero, the inevitable response was, ‘The king,’ ” Mr. Dorji said. “Immediately after that it was David Beckham, and now it’s 50 Cent, the rap artist. Parents are helpless.”
So if G.N.H. may hold the secret of happiness for people suffering from the collapse of financial institutions abroad, it offers something more urgent here in this pristine culture.
“Bhutan’s story today is, in one word, survival,” Mr. Dorji said. “Gross national happiness is survival; how to counter a threat to survival.”
Marriage in the Happiest Kingdom
The Bhutaneses are probably the one people who’s most enlightened when it comes to the affairs of the heart. Afterall, the term marriage is much man made formality which is starting to seem outdated in this modern era of the equal sex.
Here’s an article from the BBC about how Bhutanese view marriages…
“The divorce case is very, very common. If you go to the court, you will see most of the cases are all on divorce.”
It may sound like a comment from Scandinavia – but this is Bhutan and the speaker is a young artist, Barun Gurung. His own parents divorced 10 years ago, when he was 13 and his brother a little older.
“I think during their marriage they used to have small fights which, you know, used to have bad impact on us,” he told the BBC.
“They used to fight and you know my father used to put hands on my mother. So it was quite bad to see that.”
We meet in the studio where Barun works – a collective of artists in the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu, its walls plastered with brightly coloured pictures.
At least one of his colleagues joins in the conversation saying he, too, comes from a family affected by divorce. Marriage break-ups are common in this tiny kingdom. So, too, are love marriages, not arranged by one’s family.
Pregnant
In both these ways Bhutan differs from its neighbours like India, Bangladesh and Nepal; this is a region where divorce is rare and carries a stigma.
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  In Bhutan basically marriage is very mutual and practical  Passang Dorji
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A few blocks away Tshering does a completely different job. Now in her late 20s, she says she got divorced after a three-year marriage, having got pregnant while in college.
“To have a baby without a father is not very acceptable in Bhutan,” she says. “We got married and we tried to compromise and we tried to make it work. [But] we kept fighting for small little things.
“At the same time we barely spoke to each other. So it wasn’t a very healthy environment for a child to grow up in. So we talked it over and we just had a very clean and peaceful divorce – it wasn’t ugly at all.”
Thimphu is an attractive, orderly city set in a valley of pine forests. By world standards it is a very small capital. A recent press article on social trends said, however, that the town had nearly 700 divorce cases in its courts over a four-year period.
Many causes were cited, including alcoholism, infidelity, domestic violence – and plain incompatibility. There were many more cases that did not come to court. And the divorce rate is rising.
It is the kind of trend many would associate with urbanisation – but Bhutan is urbanising less quickly than its neighbours.
Barun Gurung relates it to the fact that people here “are quite easy-going and a little laid-back” and that, compared with, say, India, women here are treated more on a par with men.
But the attitude to marriage itself is also unusual.
Bhutanese are “easy-going and a little laid-back”, says Barun Gurung
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In this Buddhist-dominated society, in both rural and urban settings, many people tie the nuptial knot in a more casual, less ceremonial way, than elsewhere. There is also a long tradition of people starting to live together and, once they are clearly committed, being regarded as married.
Passang Dorji, a senior reporter at the Bhutan Times, cites his own situation.
“In Bhutan basically marriage is very mutual and practical,” he says. “It basically depends on a couple’s mutual consensus.”
He met his own wife – a teacher – in their primary school days. Later “she used to work in a very remote place and I used to go there and live with her. So basically our marriage didn’t have any ceremonies.
“So far our married life has been very good. We are parents of two and she is also a working mother.”
‘Puppy love’
It is a far cry from the lavish, sometimes cripplingly expensive, weddings common in the region.
Given that marriage is more low-key, and more often tied to romantic love than to parental choice, that might be a reason why it has become easier to leave it. And, says Passang, neither the man nor the woman is likely to be disdained.
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 Divorces shouldn’t be so cheap – there should be some cost factor so that people think twice Sangay Zam MP
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“Her friends, her relatives, her parents would be there to help and sympathise with her,” he says.
“If by stigma someone is forced to live with the person she or he doesn’t like, I think it is not a meaningful life… Our system basically gives liberty for a person to practise a lifestyle that she or he prefers.”
But some think the tide should turn; that some young people are too careless and get married for reasons of “puppy love”.
Sangay Zam, a member of parliament, stresses that many Bhutanese do still revere and value the marriage institution. She feels that marriage break-ups are usually initiated by men and are too easy.
“If the men get the opportunity to pull the strings and have their say, they would naturally have divorces. And divorces are not so expensive, if you look at the law of the country.
“So I think some of the parliamentarians are taking it up to say that divorces shouldn’t be so cheap – there should be some cost factor so that people think twice before they think about divorces.”
Barun, the artist, now has both a stepmother and a stepfather – both his parents have remarried. He gets on well with both. But he too says divorce should be a last resort.
“If the relationship is not working out, I think it is better to get divorced. But if the relationship is working out and it’s just that you have a feeling for another girl or woman, it’s really bad.”
It is striking that this generally poor country seems, in some areas of life, to be following a path more akin to Western countries than its neighbours.
Tshering is glad that as a divorced mother she is not ostracised. But she is not in a hurry to marry again.
“I need a lot of time – to bring up my son, to focus on my career – so marriage is the last thing right now,” she says, laughing.
Read the full article here at BBC Bhutanese take divorce in their stride
Bhutan Travel by Power magazine
POWER magazine from HK featured a travelogue to Bhutan for its December 2008 issue by Adam Skolnick. Below is an extract.
“
This remote mountain kingdom is a symphony for the soul
OVERTURE
At the remote 13th century Phajoding Monastery, set high on a Himalayan ridge, Kencho Doji, a smiling 23-year-old monk swathed in burgundy robes, holds a piece of a man’s skull. Not just any man’s. This skull fragment was that of a Rinpoche (an incarnate lama), a Tantric master and the founder of the monastery. “I found it in a cave nearby,” says Kencho, “where Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava, or the Second Buddha) was cremated.”
Fascinated and slightly disoriented thanks to the altitude my eyes dart around the cramped room and notice it’s stacked with Buddhist texts; some bound, others handwritten and scrolled. Plumes of burning incense rise towards the shafts of sunlight filtering through the tiny windows overlooking Thimphu Valley. Then Kencho unfurls a zip-lock bag filled with little black balls that look like peppercorns. “This is the Rinpoche’s burned flesh,” says Chencho Tshalup, my guide. “When someone is the victim of black magic, they see the lamas and eat one of these.” Both men smile. I offer a nervous smirk back. I’m no Buddhist scholar, but I know enough to realize that black magic and cannibalism are not part of the Noble Eightfold Path.
The lesson: in Bhutan it’s best to forget what you think you know; to disregard fixed thoughts and ideas; to leave your mind open.
MOVEMENT 1: BECOMING BHUTAN
“Welcome to the Land of the Thunder Dragon,” said Chencho, 28, as I stumble out of immigration and into the daylight of Thimphu, Bhutan’s laid-back capital. After a 4:30am flight from Bangkok via stormy Calcutta, I am a mess. Luckily, Chencho is there to lead me to an SUV bound for Amanresort’s luxurious Amankora Thimphu. Sometimes it’s nice to be going five-star.
Bhutan is a nation the size of Switzerland and home to just 620,000 people, most of them living in high Himalayan valleys laced with icy, foaming rivers. Amanresorts has Amankora lodges in five of those valleys, and over the next week Chencho and I will visit four of them on a five-star road trip to explore a monarchy in transition to democracy, an agrarian society moving off the farm, and a wealth of mystical mountain energy.
It didn’t take long to figure out that Thimphu is in the midst of a growth spurt. Hundreds of people flood in from southern and eastern Bhutan daily looking for work, while utilitarian concrete block apartments, dressed up with Bhutanese-style windows and moldings, are being erected on government-purchased farmland, which flanks either side of the Thimphu River.
Some of the young new residents attend arts and handicrafts classes at the School for Traditional Arts, our first stop. I duck into studios where I watch young people learning to weave, sculpt, carve and paint under the gaze of a dozen moneyed tourists (it costs a minimum of US$200 a day for tourists to visit Bhutan). The school is the brainchild of Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the nation’s fourth king – the man who ceded power to the people after historic elections last March, and who handed over the monarchy to his 28-year-old son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, in November.
The School for Traditional Arts serves a dual purpose: to preserve Bhutan’s arts and crafts and teach young people a trade to earn money between harvests. During my vague flirtations in the weaving room (where I learned that a pretty girl named Sonam was in her fourth and final year, and that she – and every other girl here – were the first ones in their family off the farm), I began to put it all together.
Rampant construction, fledgling democracy, migrant labor, cottage industries: Bhutan is developing, and fast. This realization reminded me of another, perhaps the greatest, contribution to his people by the revered King Wangchuk: Gross National Happiness, his inspired policy that is supposedly guiding all of this development.
Fifteen minutes later I am at the Center for Bhutan Studies, sitting across from the center’s chief research officer, Karma Galay. “Public policies based on happiness are far less arbitrary than those based on economics,” said Galay, 37.
In the early 1970s, a little more than a decade after Bhutan paved its first road, the king watched as other Asian countries embraced development with capitalist zeal at the cost of their culture and their environment. Thirty-five years later Bhutan is in the midst of its own development boom, but if the king’s vision is fulfilled, it will come with equitable socio-economic growth, cultural preservation, environmental conservation and good governance, the four pillars of Gross National Happiness.
Galay has a post-graduate degree in economics from Stanford University in the US. He speaks a number of languages and local dialects. It’s his job to assess how well Gross National Happiness is being put into practice. He and his team have conducted hundreds of face-to-face interviews across the country, during which they’ve assessed the population’s individual income, health and education, among other factors. On the whole, Galay is encouraged. And although this idea of legislated, collective happiness is an intellectual pursuit, it’s aided by the spiritual.
“The concept of moderation, of not being driven by money, is a Buddhist principle,” Galay says. “We’ve found that our wealthiest city, Thimphu, is the least ‘happy.’ And people who practice religious activities are happier than those who do not.”
MOVEMENT 2: WANGDUE
Thirty-six monks sit cross-legged on the floor. Some hold their two-sided drums vertically and strike them with crooked mallets, two others blow rhythmically into long brass trumpets, while the rest intone an extended mantra that becomes a rumbling buzz. Incense fills the air, butter lamps burn and cymbals rattle. In another demonstration of Bhutan’s Tantric Buddhist traditions, this ceremony is being performed in honor of the local deities that govern daily life in Wangdue. About halfway between Thimphu and Gangtey, Wangdue dzong is the gateway to western Bhutan. Bhutan was never colonized, but was once the domain of warrior kings who marked their territory with enormous mountain dzongs, or forts, built with thick mud-brick walls and outfitted with massive prayer wheels and expansive stone courtyards.
Over time, the dzongs gradually became the domains of monks. The Wangdue dzong has stood for over 250 years and this particular Buddhist ritual is over 800 years old. Both will likely stand the test of time for centuries to come, but the same cannot be said for Wangdue village, where the dzong is located. This market town is slated for demolition in 2010.
It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust when we leave the dzong’s dark halls, but soon I can see the sprawling jumble of shops and shacks that have sprung up along the roadside outside the dzong. “The government talked to the village head. He did a survey of the local people,” said one disgruntled shopkeeper with a shrug of her shoulders. “I guess the people agreed [to the demolition].” The poor were happy because they will get new government housing in nearby “relocated” Wangdue, which is already planned, plotted and paved. Compared to this winding, chaotic, living version, the new Wangdue looks like the soulless subdivision that it is. We duck into Kazang Hotel, a local dive with sticky floors, for some Druk 11,000 Super Strong beer, cheese dumplings and fiery deep-fried chilies. As Chencho and I drain bottles of beer, Kazang Choden, a shopkeeper, fills used whiskey bottles with fresh milk. She’s taken Wangdue’s demise in her stride and plans to open a shop in the new Wangdue. Chencho has mixed feelings about the situation, but considers it all part of Bhutan’s dynamic new age.
“Since the election, life has changed drastically,” he says. “Before, when people talked it was all about the king. Now we talk about the new government, our political parties. We debate about selling natural resources to India, Thailand and Bangladesh, and talk about how that money will be used to develop Bhutan. Even in the remote areas the people can now look forward to some government services.”
MOVEMENT 3: GOURGEOUS GANGTEY
Gangtey is one of those remote places – nearly 3,000m above sea level and accessible by a single road – where mountains enclose a massive valley carpeted in a quilt of potato and buckwheat fields. It is home to just a few thousand people, who live in farmhouses sprinkled on the valley’s slopes.
During the winter, Bhutan’s endangered and elegant black-neck cranes descend from higher altitudes, as do the nomadic herders who arrive with hundreds of wooly yaks, which lure predators such as panthers and snow leopards.
The Amankora Gangtey has a spectacular view of it all. From the dining room, the valley and mountains are on display in all their glory. Upon first glance, one guest says, “It’s like something out of a movie.”
But in today’s Bhutan, even a community like Gangtey, with its ageless natural cycles and rural energy, is experiencing change. That’s why, on my first Gangtey morning, Chencho insists we visit the local primary school.
We arrive during morning break. Kids aged from five to 15 in traditional plaid robes run and play in fields surrounded by mountains. “We don’t have a very good fence, I’m afraid,” says principal Pema Dorji.
Dorji is standing around a wooden table with his staff of 13 teachers, also dressed in traditional garb. While the kids play, the teachers sip tea and snack on chilies stewed in cheese sauce and folded into a light, buckwheat nan bread.
Classes are taught in English (a national policy) in rooms located in three single story mud-brick buildings, which have taken a beating by weather and time. They’re drafty but packed with children eager to learn. Dorji also manages a team of educators who travel to more remote villages.
“When I arrived last year I came from a very comfortable school with electricity and computers. We had none of that here,” says Dorji.
Dorji went to work developing a relationship with Amankora. The resorts’ guests have helped raise money to buy a generator, computers and printers, and build a basketball court for the school.
Unfortunately, the school may soon lose their principal. A 20-year veteran of Bhutan schools, Dorji has grown weary of raising a family on just US$300 a month. He’d rather be a tour guide.
“I have placed an order for a new Hyundai Santa Fe,” he tells me as I leave campus. “Next year, I will resign and begin driving guests like you around the country.”
Development is one complicated beast.
MOVEMENT 4: PUNAKHA TIME
From Gangtey our journey takes us through the lowland district of Punakha, where the sculpted terraces are drenched in the Day-Glo green of fields that produce Bhutan’s distinct red-colored rice. Thanks to its milder climate, Punakha is one of Bhutan’s fastest growing cities. Young people are pouring in from the countryside to work in new riverside resorts. Amankora’s eight-room Punakha lodge is one. We first cross a swaying, wooden bridge over a gushing river before being greeted by a cheerful bellhop in a golf cart who drives us up to the lodge. He just got the job. “My family are all farmers,” he says. It takes him two days by bus followed by a three-hour hike to get home during his holidays.
The lodge’s lobby, dining room and meditation room occupy a restored three-story farmhouse, while the soothing guestrooms are built into two dzong-like longhouses.
Punakha’s best view can be found at a new monastery built by a Bhutan queen – a strenuous one-hour hike from the lodge.
“What’s the queen’s name?” I ask Chencho as we leap across irrigation canals, skirt rice fields and tiptoe through thick mud, before beginning the steady climb to the monastery.
“Well, we have four queens, actually,” he replies sheepishly.
“Really?”
“Yes. They’re all beautiful and they’re all sisters.”
Both of us laugh.
From the roof of the monastery we can see a jigsaw of rice fields climbing towards the granite peaks that loom over the Punakha Valley. We linger to enjoy this panorama before strolling back down.
MOVEMENT 5: CATHARSIS ON THE CLIFFS
Happiness is an elusive gift. Sometimes it hits you in waves, one after another, for days, months, even years. Then when it’s gone you can barely remember what it felt like … until it comes back again.
And for all it’s ambitions of Gross National Happiness, after nearly a week of traveling here, I still can’t call Bhutan a “happy” place. There is too much change, poverty, uncertainty. At least, that’s what I thought before Chencho and I hiked up to the fabled Tiger’s Nest Monastery.
Buddhism didn’t land in Bhutan until the 8th century, when an enlightened Indian Rinpoche arrived in the Paro Valley and meditated in a cave in the clouds. Soon after he left for Tibet where he built and ran a major monastery. Then, legend has it, he turned his wife into a flying tiger and soared back with her to the Paro cave, where he spend the next few years teaching and meditating.
After an initial burst of popularity, Buddhism fell out of favor in the 9th and 10th centuries and Bhutan reverted to its animist beliefs. Interest in Buddha’s teachings was revived in the 12th century when the Tibetan Gelsey Tenzin Rabgay arrived.
Tibetan Tantric traditions merged animism – including black magic and local deities – with the Noble Eightfold Path. This solidified Buddhism in Bhutan. “It is said that Rabgay was reincarnated in Bhutan in the 17th century,” says Chencho. “When he built the Tiger’s Nest around the caves where the Indian Rinpoche lived and taught.” The trail to the Tiger’s Nest Monastery is steep and muddy. Crowded with as many tourists as monks, it winds through coniferous forests and past creek-side prayer wheels until it reaches a plateau streaming with colorful prayer flags. From there it’s a short descent to a bridge that spans a steep ravine. Suddenly, we arrive at a massive monastery built into the granite cliff face.
We make our way past the obligatory military checkpoint, where guests must leave their cameras (photos are not allowed at Bhutan’s holy sites), and climb the stairs to a top-floor altar where a monk leads us through the ritual of six bows and fills our palms with holy water.
Just as we finish, the sanctuary is filled with a flock of Bhutanese pilgrims. Chencho leads me to a much-less visited bottom floor of the monastery. Inside, a young monk tends an altar, while an elder sits on the floor, cross-legged, chanting. Next to him is a heavy-set European woman, who also chants, following a Buddhist text originally written by Rabgay.
Their mantra fills the small space. Chencho and I sit along the opposite wall, next to a gated cave, where money is strewn on the floor below yet another altar with flickering candles and butter lamps. Later Chencho tells me that this is the mythical cave where Bhutanese Buddhism was born. Yogis say that if you sit in a room where a great master once lived, you can feel his life force. That’s what this feels like. Over the next 30 minutes, the mantra washes over us along with waves of energy. It’s like a drug … like a dream.
The young monk falls into a sweet, shallow trance. Chencho and I look at each other in wonder. Finally their chanting ends and we all soak in the silence.
For the first time in weeks my head is clear. My mind is completely open and I am in tune once again.
After a few minutes, Chencho and I step out onto the edge of the cliff above Paro. The crowds, the military guards, everyone is gone. He turns and says, “Now you know the power of Bhutan.” “”
Read it at http://www.powerthemagazine.com/travel/index.html
With a dzong in my heart ….
Journalist Dawn Tan Wei from SPH visited Bhutan recently and wrote about her trip in the Straits Times Life on 18th November 2008.
Here’s an abstract.
“For 10 years, Bhutan was right up there as No 1 on my top 10 list of places to visit.
Intrigued by stories of this little mystical hermit kingdom untouched by modernity and thoroughly enchanted by the films of Bhutanese director Khyentse Norbu (The Cup, Travellers And Magicians), I was, sadly, put off by how much you had to fork out just to put one foot in there.
The US$200 a day required by the government was no small change.
But when I heard it was upping its tariff next year, there was no time to lose.
Word is that it will cost an extra $50 a day from the middle of next year, although it still covers everything: accommodation, food, land transport, the services of a guide and even trekking, if you so desire.
Government-approved lodges selected by your tour operator are by no means luxurious, but they are clean, comfortable and well-managed.
Meals, too, are often eaten at hotels or restaurants catering to tourists.
If you want five-star comfort, you will have to pay extra for the handful of luxury resorts such as Amankora, Zhiwa Ling and Uma Paro, where Hong Kong stars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Carina Lau got married.
So why go to Bhutan when neighbouring Nepal and Tibet offer just about everything it does–spectacular scenery, better trekking infrastructure and more temples and monasteries than you can count–and at a 10th of the price?
The answer to that, if you ask me, is: to be among the happiest people on earth. “
Read more about her trip at Asia News Netwrok
Bhutan celebrates coronation of new king
The new king of Bhutan has been crowned in a lavish coronation ceremony in the isolated Himalayan kingdom.
King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, 28, an Oxford-educated bachelor, becomes the world’s youngest monarch.
He has become head of state of the world’s newest democracy after his father abdicated in 2006 as Bhutan changed to a constitutional monarchy.
The coronation of the Buddhist nation’s fifth hereditary king fell in what is known in Bhutan as the month of the male earth rat.
‘Gross National Happiness’
The ceremony comprised an ancient and colourful ritual in a white-walled royal palace in the capital, Thimphu. ….. read more
Reports
MSNBC – Bhutan celebrates coronation of new king
BBC – Lavish coronation for Bhutan king
Pictures of Bhutan Coronation
BBC – In pictures: Bhutan coronation
Boston Big Picture – Bhutan crowns a new King
