Bhutan's history: a state passed down from a lama to a parliament

Who lived in the valleys before Bhutan existed

Stone tools, weapons and the remains of large stone structures show that the land was inhabited by about 2000 BCE, though nothing written survives from then. Historians have proposed a state called Lhomon or Monyul, the "dark land", existing in the centuries before 600 CE; the main Wikipedia article on Bhutan dates it from 500 BCE, its history article from about 1000 BC. Bhutanese and Tibetan chronicles also call the region Lhomon Tsendenjong, the southern sandalwood country.

Buddhism arrived from Tibet in the 7th century. The Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo, who reigned from 627 to 649, ordered two temples built, Jambay Lhakhang in Bumthang and Kyichu Lhakhang in the Paro valley. It was propagated in earnest from 746 under Sindhu Raja, an exiled Indian king ruling from Bumthang, and in 810, according to Bhutan's history as Wikipedia records it, the saint Padmasambhava came from Nepal at his invitation. Bhutan knows him as Guru Rinpoche, and his birth anniversary is still a public holiday.

What followed was not a state but a set of small valley monarchies, each ruled by a deb, and a contest between Buddhist schools. From the 12th century two branches of the Kagyu school competed from their own fortresses: the Lhapa, credited with introducing the fortified dzong, and the Drukpa, brought by the Tibetan monk Phajo Drugom Zhigpo. The Drukpa slowly gained ground. The country's own name, Druk Yul, means the land of the Drukpa, usually rendered the Land of the Thunder Dragon, and it has been in use since the 17th century. "Bhutan" appears only in official correspondence in English.

Britannica's account of the period is shorter and differs in its names. It reports that some four to five centuries ago a Tibetan lama, Sheptoon La-Pha, became king with the title dharma raja, and that Bhutan probably became a distinct political entity then.

How a refugee lama founded the Bhutanese state

The founder was Ngawang Namgyal, born in 1594 at Ralung monastery in Tibet and enthroned there as the head of the Drukpa line. A rival claimant had the backing of the ruler of Tsang, one of the strongest regional powers in Tibet. In 1616, facing arrest and a demand that he hand over the monastery's relics, Ngawang Namgyal left Tibet through Gasa and founded Cheri monastery at the head of the Thimphu valley.

He took the title Zhabdrung, "at whose feet one submits", and built a state out of fortresses. In 1629 he built Simtokha Dzong at the entrance to the Thimphu valley, from which traffic between Paro in the west and Trongsa in the east could be controlled. The dzong network did two jobs at once: it held off invasion from Tibet and it brought local lords under central control. Five of those dzongs, Punakha, Wangdue Phodrang, Paro, Trongsa and Dagana, have stood together on Bhutan's UNESCO tentative list since 2012 as the centre of temporal and religious authority.

Tibetan armies invaded around 1629, in 1631 and again in 1639. Ngawang Namgyal defeated them, and in 1634 beat the army of Karma Tenkyong in the Battle of Five Lamas. A joint Mongol and Tibetan force failed in the southern lowlands in 1643 and another Tibetan invasion failed in 1647. The first Europeans on record, the Portuguese Jesuits Estêvão Cacella and João Cabral, reached him in 1627 and offered firearms and their services against Tibet. He declined.

What the Tsa Yig set up

His law code, the Tsa Yig, described both the religious and the civil order and stayed in force until the 1960s. It established a dual government: a monastic body under an elected abbot, the Je Khenpo, and a civil administration under a regent, the Druk Desi, with the Zhabdrung above both. The country was divided into three regions, each under a governor, the ponlop or penlop, seated in a major dzong. Those governors collected taxes, judged cases and commanded troops, and their revenue came from the trade between Tibet and India and from land.

Why the Zhabdrung's death was kept secret

Ngawang Namgyal died in 1651. The governors kept the death secret for 54 years, issuing orders in his name and explaining that he was on a long silent retreat. Food was left outside his locked door. The purpose, as the Wikipedia biography records it, was to prevent a struggle over the succession and a return to rule by warlords.

The secret bought time but not a successor. His son and his stepbrother were installed in 1651 and 1680, both as minors under regents. To keep the office going, the Je Khenpo and the Druk Desi invoked multiple reincarnation: the founder's body, speech and mind could each be reborn in a different person. The result was more claimants rather than fewer, and power drained to the regional governors. The penlops of Trongsa and Paro and the dzong governors of Punakha, Thimphu and Wangdue Phodrang fought each other for most of the next two centuries.

The end of the line is dated differently by the two main sources. The Wikipedia account of the Wangchuck dynasty says the last officially recognised Zhabdrung died in 1903 and the last Druk Desi in 1904. Britannica says the last dharma raja died in the 1930s, that no reincarnation was found, and that the office then lapsed.

Bhutan's reach in this period extended well beyond its present border. Ladakh granted it monastic estates near Mount Kailash in western Tibet, which it held until China seized them in 1959, and for a time it held monastic fiefs in Ladakh, Zanskar and Lahul and in Lo Manthang and Dolpo, now in Nepal. Britannica adds that a Chinese imperial army that invaded Tibet in 1720 established suzerainty over both Tibet and Bhutan. Wikipedia's history of Bhutan states the opposite principle: that no outside power has occupied or governed Bhutan since at least the 10th century, nominal tributary status apart.

How Bhutan lost the Duars to Britain

The conflict began in the plains. By the mid-1760s Bhutan treated the principality of Cooch Behar as a dependency and kept a garrison there. In 1772 a disputed succession brought in the East India Company, whose force drove the Bhutanese out and invaded Bhutan itself. A treaty of 25 April 1774 returned Bhutan to its borders of before 1730, with a symbolic tribute of five horses.

The next ninety years were a long argument over the Duars, the strip of lowland at the foot of the hills that controlled the passes. Britain annexed the Assam Duars in 1841 for an annual compensation of 10,000 rupees. After raids into Sikkim and Cooch Behar in 1862 and a failed British mission in 1864, Britain declared war in November 1864. The Bhutanese had no regular army, only dzong guards with matchlocks, bows, swords and catapults.

The Duar War lasted five months. Under the Treaty of Sinchula of 11 November 1865 Bhutan ceded the Assam and Bengal Duars and the 83-square-kilometre territory of Dewangiri in return for an annual subsidy of 50,000 rupees. Britannica describes the result as the cession of control over Bhutan's southern border passes.

How the Penlop of Trongsa became king

The family that ended the regency came from Bumthang and held the hereditary governorship of Trongsa. Ugyen Wangchuck, pro-British, beat the anti-British, pro-Tibetan penlop of Paro in a series of civil wars between 1882 and 1885. In 1903 and 1904 he went with the British expedition to Lhasa as a mediator and was knighted for his part in the Anglo-Tibetan Convention of 1904.

In 1907 an assembly of monks, officials and the heads of leading families elected him Druk Gyalpo, the Dragon King, with hereditary succession. He reigned from 17 December 1907, the date Bhutan now keeps as its National Day, to 21 August 1926. Britannica puts "elected" in quotation marks and notes that he was the strongest penlop at the time. The British, wanting a stable northern frontier, approved.

The Treaty of Punakha followed on 8 January 1910. Britain undertook not to interfere in Bhutan's internal administration and Bhutan agreed to be guided by British advice on its external relations. The Wikipedia account of Bhutan describes it as making Bhutan something like an Indian princely state, while noting that it never formally became a protectorate. When India became independent in 1947, the arrangement passed to India in the treaty of 8 August 1949, which also returned Dewangiri.

What changed after China took Tibet

When the People's Republic of China took control of Tibet in 1950, Bhutan closed its northern frontier and turned south. India strengthened its garrisons along Bhutan's border with Tibet in the 1950s and paid for most of a programme of roads; an all-weather road from Thimphu to Phuntsholing on the Indian border was completed in 1962. Before it, according to Britannica, the trip from the border to the capital took six days by mule.

The third king, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, who reigned from 1952 to 1972, rebuilt the state around those roads. He established a National Assembly, the Tshogdu, in 1953; Wikipedia gives it 130 members and Britannica 151. He abolished slavery and serfdom, separated the courts from the executive in 1968, set up a cabinet the same year, and made Thimphu the capital all year round in 1966, where it had previously alternated with a winter seat at Punakha. In 1968 he decreed that sovereign power, including the power to remove the king, lay with the National Assembly, and renounced his veto over its bills.

The period was not calm. The prime minister, Jigme Palden Dorji, was assassinated in Phuntsholing in April 1964, and an attempt on the king's life followed in July 1965. Bhutan joined the Colombo Plan in 1962 and the United Nations in 1971, after three years as an observer.

Why the Lhotshampa ended up in camps in Nepal

People of Nepali origin had settled the uninhabited south since the 19th century, and in larger numbers in the early 20th, encouraged by Bhutan House in Kalimpong, which collected taxes from them; in the 1930s it settled 5,000 Nepali families in Tsirang alone. A Citizenship Act of 1958 granted citizenship to those who could prove ten years' residence and banned further immigration. The Dzongkha name for them, Lhotshampa, means southern borderlanders.

In the 1980s the government adopted a policy of "One Nation, One People". The sixth Five-Year Plan (1987 to 1992) introduced Driglam Namzhag, the national code of dress and etiquette, and Nepali was dropped from the school curriculum in 1990. A census in the south in 1988 required families to produce a tax receipt from 1958, or a certificate of origin, to prove citizenship. Protests followed in 1990, organised in part by the Bhutan Peoples' Party, which the government branded a terrorist organisation.

Two accounts of what happened next

The government's account. The census was a measure against illegal immigration across a porous southern border, and many of those who left had never been lawful residents. According to the Wikipedia history of Bhutan, Bhutanese reports put the number who left at about 5,000. Britannica records the government's position that Bhutanese of Nepali origin made up about a third of residents and that many had lived there illegally. In 1992 the foreign minister, Dawa Tsering, told the Calcutta Statesman that a growing Nepali population would make the country "another Sikkim and Darjeeling", a reference to Sikkim, whose monarchy was ended in 1975 after a vote in which its Nepali majority prevailed. The government also cited violence by protesters, including a bomb on a bridge near Phuntsholing in February 1990.

The refugees' account. They were citizens expelled for their ethnicity. Many say the army forced them to sign "Voluntary Migration Form" documents stating that they left willingly, and Human Rights Watch reported that security forces removed people from their homes and coerced them into renouncing citizenship. Refugee reports put the number expelled at more than 100,000, and Bhutan's Nepalese, as Britannica records their claim, put their share of residents at about half, against the government's third.

The camps in eastern Nepal held more than 100,000 people by 1996 and about 107,000 at their peak. Bhutan and Nepal agreed in 2000 on the return of certain categories, and verification began in March 2001, but by 2011 no refugee had been repatriated. Resettlement abroad began in 2007, and by January 2019 about 112,800 had been resettled, most of them in the United States.

How the monarchy wrote itself into a constitution

The fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, came to the throne in 1972 at 16 and reigned until 2006. In 1998 he dissolved the cabinet so that it could be partly elected by the National Assembly, handed it most of his administrative work, and accepted that the assembly could remove him by a vote of no confidence. Television and the internet were allowed in 1999. Drafting of a written constitution began on 30 November 2001, and copies of the draft were circulated for comment in 2005.

He abdicated in December 2006 in favour of his son. Sources date it to the 9th (the Wikipedia accounts of Bhutan and its dynasty), the 14th (Britannica) or the 15th (Wikipedia's history of Bhutan). Political parties were legalised in April 2007. Elections to the new upper house, the National Council, were held on 31 December 2007 and to the National Assembly on 24 March 2008, and the constitution was promulgated on 18 July 2008. It can change the monarchy's status only through a national referendum, and it provides for a king who violates it to be made to abdicate.

The revised treaty with India came into force on 1 January 2011 without the old clause on Indian guidance of foreign affairs. Bhutan's northern border remains partly undemarcated: in 2017, Indian and Chinese troops faced each other for two months on a small plateau that Britannica describes as claimed by both of them and by Bhutan, and in 2021 China and Bhutan signed a memorandum to speed up talks that by then had run more than 35 years. This catalogue records the claim and takes no position on it. On 13 December 2023 the United Nations removed Bhutan from its list of least developed countries.