The Buddhist Kingdom That Refuses to Be Like Everywhere Else
Somewhere in the writer's life is a running document called The List — the countries still unvisited, ranked by longing. Ethiopia's on it. Indonesia, South Korea, Madagascar, Taiwan. He and his wife once pledged to knock off two new countries a year, and did, until Covid and two babies quietly ended the streak. Eventually they remembered the obvious fact that they were going to die someday, dusted off The List, and went straight for the country that had been sitting at the top of it for years: Bhutan.
Bhutan is easy to overlook on a map — 800,000 people wedged between India and China, two countries that between them have annexed or absorbed most of their smaller neighbors at some point. Bhutan simply never got swallowed. It spent centuries as a scattering of warring tribes before unifying in the 1600s, and it has since become the world's last Buddhist kingdom, a description that turns out to undersell how literally Buddhist and how literally kingdom-y it is. Temples everywhere. A tour guide fluent in omens, auspicious river bends, and the quiet arithmetic of good and bad luck. And a strange, lovely architectural discipline — the airport, the shopping centers, the roadside buildings, all built in the same traditional Bhutanese style, as if the whole country agreed decades ago on what it should look like and never wavered.
The king, by every account offered, is the kind of ruler that makes visiting Westerners slightly embarrassed about their own governments. When Covid shut down tourism — an industry employing some 50,000 Bhutanese — he started paying displaced workers $120 a month out of his own pocket, reportedly to the edge of personal bankruptcy, until the industry recovered. Bhutan also refuses to euthanize stray dogs on religious grounds, so the streets are full of them, fed on restaurant scraps — and during the pandemic, the king asked citizens to bring the dogs cooked meals and wrap them in blankets through the cold months. It's the kind of story that sounds almost too tidy, the sort of thing propaganda is made of. The writer notes, wryly, that he'd once heard equally glowing tales about beloved leaders in North Korea. But Bhutan and North Korea are not, in fact, the same country, and this is one of those rare cases where the flattering story is probably just... true.
What makes Bhutan strangest to outside eyes is how deliberately it has resisted becoming like everywhere else. Television and internet were banned until 1999. Tourism only happens through guided tours, immigration is nearly impossible, and the government has protected its forests so aggressively that Bhutan is the only carbon-negative country on Earth — its trees absorb more CO2 than its people produce. In 1972, the king decided Gross National Happiness mattered more than Gross Domestic Product and built policy around it ever since. In 2011 the UN passed a resolution suggesting other countries might want to try measuring happiness too; everyone else appears to have quietly ignored it.
None of this comes free. Bhutan's traditionalism is now colliding with the plain fact that young Bhutanese keep leaving for opportunity elsewhere, and the kingdom's answer is a long bet: Gelephu Mindfulness City, a planned economic hub meant to bring in innovation and jobs while somehow keeping the old ways intact. It sounds remarkable. It is also, by most estimates, twenty years from finished — which feels fitting for a country that has never been in a hurry to catch up with anyone.
Distilled from Wait But Why