The history of Bhutan

Bhutan, a mountain kingdom on the southern slopes of the eastern Himalayas, calls itself Druk Yul, the land of the thunder dragon, after the Drukpa school of Tibetan Buddhism that has shaped it for eight centuries. Its early history comes to us largely through Buddhist chronicles and legend. In the seventeenth century a Tibetan lama, Ngawang Namgyal, united its valleys into a state governed by monks and regents, and Bhutan resisted Tibetan, Mongol and British armies, though it lost its southern plains to British India. A hereditary monarchy founded in 1907 led the country out of deep isolation from the 1950s, and in 2008 the fourth king gave Bhutan a constitution and an elected parliament. Its modern history also includes the expulsion of a large part of its Nepali-speaking minority around 1990.

Stone tools and megalithic remains suggest that the valleys of Bhutan were inhabited by at least 2000 BCE, but little is known about the earliest societies. Bhutanese and Tibetan chronicles call the region Lhomon or Monyul, the southern land of the Mon, a term Tibetans used for the non-Buddhist peoples of the Himalayan foothills. The Monpa of the east and other Tibeto-Burman peoples, such as the speakers of the many languages still found in central and eastern Bhutan, are thought to descend from these early inhabitants. They farmed the valleys, kept yaks and cattle in the high pastures and worshipped mountain, water and forest spirits, beliefs that survive alongside Buddhism in local rituals and in the Bon religion.

The name Bhutan probably comes from Indian words for the edge of Tibet, and it was used by outsiders, not by the Bhutanese themselves. For most of its history the country had no single name or ruler. Each valley was dominated by local nobles, sometimes called deb or kings, and the most prominent early kingdom was in Bumthang in central Bhutan.

According to tradition, Buddhism reached Bhutan in the seventh century, when the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo of the Tibetan Empire built a network of temples to pin down a demoness lying across the Himalayas. Two of them, Kyichu Lhakhang in Paro and Jambay Lhakhang in Bumthang, are counted among the oldest temples in the country. In the eighth or early ninth century the tantric master Padmasambhava, known in Bhutan as Guru Rinpoche, is said to have come to Bumthang at the invitation of a local ruler, Sindhu Raja, and to have meditated at the cliff where the Taktsang monastery, the Tiger's Nest, now stands above the Paro valley. He is regarded as Bhutan's patron saint, and the Nyingma school associated with him became the first strong Buddhist tradition in the country.

After the collapse of the Tibetan Empire in the ninth century, Tibetan settlers, monks and soldiers moved into the western and central valleys, and Tibetan language and culture spread. Over the following centuries Bhutan became a field of competition between Tibetan Buddhist schools, each founding monasteries and building ties with local families. In the thirteenth century the lama Phajo Drugom Zhigpo, who by tradition arrived in 1224, brought the Drukpa Kagyu school to the Thimphu valley and defeated its rivals there, and his descendants spread its influence across the west. The great Nyingma scholar Longchenpa spent years in exile in Bumthang in the fourteenth century, and the treasure-revealer Pema Lingpa, born in Bumthang in 1450, became Bhutan's most celebrated native saint.

In 1616 Ngawang Namgyal, a high-ranking lama of the Drukpa school, fled from Tibet after a dispute over who was the rightful reincarnation of the head of his lineage. Welcomed by Drukpa patrons in western Bhutan, he took the title Zhabdrung, meaning the one at whose feet one submits, and over the next three decades turned a collection of valleys into a state. He built a chain of dzongs, massive fortress-monasteries, at Simtokha, Punakha, Paro, Trongsa and elsewhere, which served as centres of both religious and civil government. Rival lamas were subdued, and Tibetan armies, sent by the rulers of Tibet, invaded around 1629 and in 1631 and 1639, a combined Mongol and Tibetan force attacked in 1643, and another Tibetan army came in 1647, but each time they were driven back. The Zhabdrung's victory in the Battle of Five Lamas in 1634 secured his position.

Two Portuguese Jesuits, Estêvão Cacella and João Cabral, passed through on their way to Tibet in 1627 and stayed for several months at the Zhabdrung's court, the first Europeans recorded in Bhutan. Ngawang Namgyal also created the dual system of government that lasted until 1907. Religious affairs were led by the Je Khenpo, the chief abbot of the monastic body, and civil administration by the Druk Desi, a regent, with regional governors, the penlops, in charge of the major districts. A legal code, the Tsa Yig, drew on Buddhist ethics and remained in force until the 1960s.

When the Zhabdrung died in 1651, his officials announced that he had entered a long meditation retreat, and they kept his death secret for about half a century, issuing orders in his name. Authority was later attached to his reincarnations, recognised in his body, speech and mind, but real power passed to the regents and governors, who fought frequent civil wars over the office of Druk Desi. Bhutan nonetheless remained independent, repelling a Tibetan and Mongol invasion in 1714, intervening in the neighbouring kingdom of Sikkim and, from the 1730s, taking control of Cooch Behar on the plains, whose raja had sought help against the Mughal Empire. Bhutan also held monastic estates in western Tibet near Mount Kailash, which it kept until China seized them in 1959.

In 1772 a disputed succession in Cooch Behar brought Bhutan into collision with the British East India Company, which sent troops to expel the Bhutanese garrison and invaded the southern hills. A treaty in 1774 restored the old border, and the governor-general Warren Hastings sent missions to Bhutan and Tibet in the hope of opening trade. Disputes over the Duars, the strip of fertile plains at the foot of the hills that Bhutan controlled, grew after Britain annexed Assam in 1826. Britain took over the Assam Duars in 1841 in return for an annual payment, and after Bhutanese raids on Sikkim and Cooch Behar in 1862 and the failure of a British peace mission in 1864, it declared war in November of that year.

The Duar War of 1864 and 1865 lasted five months. Bhutanese forces armed with matchlocks, bows and swords won some engagements, but under the Treaty of Sinchula, signed on 11 November 1865, Bhutan gave up the Bengal and Assam Duars and the area of Dewangiri in return for an annual subsidy of 50,000 rupees. The loss cut Bhutan off from the plains and made it a mountain state bounded by the British Raj.

In the 1870s and 1880s the two most powerful regional lords, the penlop of Paro and the penlop of Trongsa, fought for supremacy. Ugyen Wangchuck, penlop of Trongsa, won the decisive civil war of 1882 to 1885 and became the real ruler of the country. He cooperated with Britain, accompanying Francis Younghusband's expedition to Lhasa in 1904 as a mediator, and was knighted by the British in 1905. On 17 December 1907 an assembly of monks, officials and leading families at Punakha elected him the first Druk Gyalpo, or Dragon King, ending the dual system.

By the Treaty of Punakha in 1910, Britain doubled its subsidy and promised not to interfere in Bhutan's internal affairs, while Bhutan agreed to accept British advice on foreign relations. The treaty protected Bhutan against the claims of the Qing dynasty, which had just sent troops into Tibet and asserted authority over the Himalayan states. The second king, Jigme Wangchuck, who reigned from 1926 to 1952, strengthened royal control over the monasteries and districts but kept the country closed to outsiders. When India became independent in 1947 it took Britain's place, and the Treaty of Friendship of 1949 renewed the arrangement, with India guiding Bhutan's foreign policy and returning Dewangiri.

The third king, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, who reigned from 1952 to 1972, is often called the father of modern Bhutan. In 1953 he created the National Assembly, and he abolished serfdom, carried out land reform and separated the courts from the executive. When the People's Republic of China took control of Tibet in 1950 and 1951, and especially after the Tibetan uprising of 1959, Bhutan closed its northern border and turned decisively towards India, which financed its first five-year development plan in 1961. The first motor road, linking Phuntsholing on the Indian border with Thimphu, was completed in 1962, and Thimphu became the permanent capital in the 1960s. The reforms provoked resistance: in 1964 the prime minister, Jigme Palden Dorji, was assassinated by an army corporal. Bhutan joined the Colombo Plan in 1962 and the United Nations in 1971, and it was one of the first states to recognise Bangladesh that year.

Jigme Singye Wangchuck became king at sixteen in 1972. He expanded schools, health care and hydroelectric power, exported to India, and allowed small numbers of tourists from 1974 under a policy of high-value, low-volume tourism. He became known internationally for the idea of gross national happiness, the principle that development should be judged by well-being, culture and the environment as well as by economic growth. Bhutan watched with concern as the neighbouring monarchy of Sikkim was abolished and the kingdom absorbed into India in 1975.

From the late nineteenth century, settlers of Nepali origin, known in Bhutan as Lhotshampa, the southerners, had cleared and farmed the southern foothills, and by the 1980s they formed a large part of the population. Citizenship laws of 1977 and 1985 and a census in 1988 classified many of them as illegal immigrants. Under a policy of 'One Nation, One People', the government required the traditional dress and etiquette of the northern Drukpa majority and in 1990 ended teaching in Nepali. Large protests in the south that year were followed by arrests, and human rights groups reported torture and other abuses by security forces, while the government accused some protesters of violence. By the early 1990s more than 100,000 Lhotshampa had fled or been expelled to camps in eastern Nepal, where many remained stateless for years. Repeated talks between Bhutan and Nepal failed to arrange their return, and from 2007 most were resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe.

In December 2003 the Royal Bhutan Army drove out separatist guerrillas from Assam, who had set up camps in the southern forests, in coordination with Indian forces along the border.

The fourth king pushed for democracy from above. In 2005 a draft constitution was circulated for public discussion, and in December 2006 he abdicated in favour of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who was crowned in November 2008. Elections to the new National Council and National Assembly were held in 2007 and 2008, and the constitution adopted in 2008 made Bhutan a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional king, who can be removed by parliament. Television and the internet had arrived only in 1999.

Power has since changed hands at every election. Jigme Thinley of the Druk Phuensum Tshogpa was the first elected prime minister from 2008 to 2013, followed by Tshering Tobgay of the People's Democratic Party, then from 2018 by Lotay Tshering of Druk Nyamrup Tshogpa. Tobgay returned as prime minister in January 2024. Bhutan has never established formal diplomatic relations with China, and the two countries have negotiated over their disputed border since the 1980s, signing an agreement in 2021 to speed up the talks. Facing youth emigration and the slow recovery of tourism after the pandemic, the king announced in December 2023 a special economic zone at Gelephu in the south, planned as the Gelephu Mindfulness City.