So Close to Heaven (3 page)

Bhutan has had a modern capital (though mostly housed in a walled fortress) for less than half a century. In the rankings of world capitals, Thimphu has few competitors among the miniatures. Had it not just got its first traffic light, Thimphu and its mere hundreds of homes and wood-fronted shops arranged along a few short paved roads—only one of them connecting the town to anywhere else in the country—might have survived into the twenty-first century as the most bucolic seat of government on earth. With no airport or train station disgorging newcomers (just flocks of small buses, which, wisely, don’t ply the narrow mountain roads at night), Thimphu has not had much of an opportunity to develop the ubiquitous landmarks that make so many cities interchangeable, forcing the traveler to get out of town in order to see the country. Although it may not seem so to Bhutanese from the distant hills, Thimphu (with something like twenty thousand people; no one
seems sure)
is
Bhutan from the moment of arrival. Mountains enclose it, monasteries and temples define its skyline, national building codes require that its homes and shops (there are no industries) hew to traditional architectural styles, strolling monks and farmers people its few pavements and numerous earthen byways, mingling with the modernized hustlers of a burgeoning middle class and the knots of idle young men caught somewhere between a subsistence past and a money economy.

At about seven thousand feet altitude, Thimphu and its environs along a willow-lined river are also much like the other high mountain valleys in which the majority of Bhutanese, and many other Himalayan people, live. Bhutan has four major climatological and topographical bands, but most of its towns and villages grew up historically in temperate regions stretching from east to west along the country’s mountainous but fertile midsection from Thimphu to Tashigang. To the south of this strip there are a band of cooler broadleaf forests and then a subtropical zone. To the north there is alpine scrub, and the snow line that announces the high Himalayan peaks stretching along the frontier with Tibet.

Until relatively recently, Bhutanese Buddhists from the temperate valleys had no interest in the steamy southern lands along the Indian border, where the vegetation is subtropical and rain is heavy during monsoons, though there are no true rain forests. Heat, disease, pests, and soil inhospitable to the grain crops and vegetables preferred by many Bhutanese made the south unattractive. Spurning the south, however, meant leaving it open to influxes of immigrants, most of them Hindus from Nepal and India. Political and ethnic tensions followed.

Because Bhutan is underpopulated and has adopted a policy of conserving its natural resources, the country is a kind of living Himalayan natural park, full of the animals and plants that have disappeared in more crowded, less environmentally conscious countries in the region. In the south, where sal and other subtropical trees grow, there are deer, rhinos, monkeys, langurs, and elephants. The huge Manas game sanctuary is in this belt, which is more easily reached from India than from most Bhutanese towns, though there are one or two north-south feeder roads that invite detours from the main east-west road to Tashigang.

Above the subtropical belt, forests contain a mixture of deciduous and evergreen trees, dense shrubs, vines, and parasitic plants. Lush woodland floors, peppered with acorns and other edible nuts and seeds, support
many animals, among them bears, squirrels, more monkeys, antelope, deer, leopards, wild boars, and an unbelievable aviary of birds. In the third band, the temperate zone, dominant along the east-west highway, there are cypress, blue pine, spruce, hemlock, fir, and juniper, along with oak, maple, larch, and giant rhododendron. There are also flowering fruit trees, peach and cherry, growing wild, and cultivated apple orchards. In the temperate zone the treeline occurs around eleven thousand feet, and yaks graze on windy grasslands dotted with scrub along the road as it climbs through that altitude to the mountain passes. Higher (and farther north) of this belt, animal and bird life would be alpine: the goatlike takin, some deer, owls, eagles, hawks, ravens. On the slopes up to the permanent snowfields at fifteen thousand feet or more, only stunted bushes, dwarf rhododendrons, and alpine flowers grow. No roads scar this pristine wilderness.

With a few notorious exceptions, the first outsiders to penetrate the self-imposed isolation of the Bhutanese were charmed and impressed by the country and its people. Explaining how Lieutenant Samuel Davis, a surveyor (and, fortunately for us, an artist) in imperial Britain’s Bengal Army, came to produce as an eighteenth-century chronicler of Bhutan a very positive account of this land beyond the colonial pale, the historian Michael Aris wrote (with only a slight dig at the pretensions of the expatriate British): “The warm sympathy with which he accurately recorded the local scene was certainly inspired by the realization that here was a society
almost
as good as his own, enjoying a high state of civilization and surpassing natural beauty, inhabited by a people to whom he could truly relate.”

A decade earlier, another Briton in colonial service, George Bogle—remembered for his methodical planting of potatoes everywhere he went in Bhutan, adding a new delicacy to the local diet—wrote in his journal: “The more I see of the Bhutanese, the more I am pleased with them.” Apart from their trustworthiness and good humor, said Bogle, the Bhutanese were “the best-built race of men I ever saw.” That is still stunningly true. In formal national attire, the men are dashing yet approachable, with sensitive Tibeto-Burman faces above strong bodies built of years on trails that would fell most trekkers. Poor farmers, old before their time and with their ghos well worn, have faces creased with humor and goodwill below towheads of snowy hair. Over and over, I saw men who would be called peasants elsewhere rise to full, self-possessed
stature to welcome a guest or have a photograph taken in poses that effortlessly and probably unintentionally copy the stances and demeanors of a century of kings. Bhutanese women in the countryside, round-faced and hearty, display a Chaucerian mirth and sensibility; only their newly Westernized town cousins affect a demure or languid look.

For many years before and after Bogle and Davis, the Bhutanese, guided by a policy of wariness and aided by geography, shut out the world almost entirely. In the latter part of the twentieth century, as other once-closed Himalayan realms—Nepal, Ladakh, Sikkim, and Tibet—were opening to tourism, Bhutan held back, fearful of scarring its unspoiled terrain and turning its spontaneous, pervasive religiosity into a Buddhist performance for camcorders. When tourists finally began to arrive, limits were placed on their numbers.

But the Bhutanese are discovering that tourism may not be their most pressing problem. Some disturbing changes that threaten this unique Himalayan culture are springing from within the Bhutanese themselves as they proceed, through trial and error, toward integration into the wider world. What Bhutan is going through now should be of interest to all of us who worry about how an overcrowded planet increasingly headed toward a crisis of physical survival in the next century, especially in South Asia, will cope with the primal screams of small, endangered human cultures that get in the way of the scramble for farmland and living space.

But even among these threatened communities, the Bhutanese stand apart. Many of Asia’s endangered societies are tribal—food-gatherers or pastoral nomads whose development stopped at a basic level of subsistence—and they attract the sympathy and support of anthropologists and good-hearted laypeople, particularly in Europe, who form paternalistic committees and organize demonstrations to look after their interests. The Bhutanese—proud, capable, lonely survivors of a developed ancient civilization of scholastic brilliance and considerable social achievement—are far removed in time and lifestyle from tribalism, by any definition. No charitable crusaders panting to save the world’s naïfs reach out to them; in any case, they would disdain that kind of help. The few foreigners allowed to live in the Dragon Kingdom, ostensibly to help develop it, soon learn that the Bhutanese always do things their own way and in their own time. Down to the lowest farmer, they need to be
convinced that something new being dangled before them is something they need and want. Then there’s no stopping them.

In an electronic age, and at a time when people can move from place to place with relative ease, defying almost any nation’s efforts to close its borders, the world beyond Bhutan intrudes with or without the catalyst of tourists or other visiting foreigners. The Bhutanese king’s periodic orders banning satellite dishes become gestures sadly close to commanding the sea to hold back, because television receivers
are
permitted, and they connect to video players, bringing tales of casual violence to people barely out of an age of mythology. The five young men accused of killing the lama of Chimme Lhakhang and his two novices apparently told the police that they identified with the high-living gangsters they saw in cheap video films flooding the country from India, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. Or at least that’s the way the police wanted the story to be told. “The motive for the murder was not village vendetta, revenge, or reprisal, but purely greed,” the police told
Kuensel.
“Such cold-blooded murders are normally unheard of in this country.”

If murder is still rare, theft from religious monuments is not, and this may sooner or later lead to the locking away of more temple treasures. Because icons and chortens, or shrines, are known to contain objects of value—if not pure silver and gold, certainly semiprecious stones—they are increasingly the targets of thieves no longer fearful of divine retribution for tampering with holy relics. Among the stones are corals, turquoise, and agates called
zi
, which many Himalayan Buddhists believe have been put in place by the gods themselves.
Zi
are small stones etched with white stripes in a process that has apparently been lost over the centuries, thus giving rise to the legend that the stones had miraculous origins. These old stones command very high prices from collectors. King Jigme Singye Wangchuck says that because of the lucrative market for relics from the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, there are hardly any chortens in Bhutan that have not been pilfered. Those in lonely spots along near-empty roads or on hilltops are most vulnerable; some have been sledgehammered to destruction in the search for booty.

Temple images are next, as the grisly murder of the lama of Chimme Lhakhang demonstrated. There are those thieves who are already more sophisticated and calculating than the brutal band who slit the lama’s throat. Near Bumthang, a temple was robbed of a priceless image by a
Nepali-born con artist who represented himself to the abbot of the monastery as a would-be student. The thief pursued his religious studies long enough to become part of the community. Then one night he replaced the temple’s most valuable image with a fake, and fled the country. The next day the old abbot immediately, almost instinctively, spotted the fraudulent image and spread the alarm. Remarkably, the thief was caught not long after in India trying to unload the treasure, and this story had a happy ending. But it was also a cautionary tale. Ominously, the robber later escaped while being moved from one Bhutanese jail to another. Such escapes often signal connivance.

In other South Asian nations, poverty and unemployment may be considered excuses for criminal behavior, but not in Bhutan. “We don’t have beggars,” said Rigzin Dorji, the scholar—civil servant who as head of the Special Commission on Cultural Affairs had the unique job of maintaining cultural standards and preserving what was called “the Bhutanese way.” “Even a poor family will have a house, some chickens, maybe one or two cows, some pigs, and a little land for cultivation. The country is our mother; all the people are our children.” Yet sophisticated international art thieves, on the prowl for booty from untouched monasteries and temples where literally priceless treasures are largely un-catalogued, clearly have ways of tempting even the offspring of this Himalayan Eden with windfall wealth and unusual excitement.

Bhutan has wandered without a map into that psychological territory where a magical innocence is lost and there are no signposts to what lies ahead. In Buddhist terms, the Bhutanese are collectively in some kind of
bardo
, the place between cycles of death and rebirth, waiting to see if they will enter the next life as a nation selectively modernized for the common good but otherwise unaltered, or as another small third-world country rent with social and ethnic divisions and vulnerable to corruption, violence, and political opportunism. One way or another, change is coming. This is not Brigadoon.

Until the 1960s, the Bhutanese lived a medieval existence. There were no roads, no postal service, no telephones, no national currency or money economy, no village schools, no hospitals, no airports, no towns of any size. Families in their brightly decorated half-timbered houses grew their own food, wove the cloth for their traditional garments, and bartered what they could for a few luxuries carried into their isolated mountain valleys on the backs of traders from Tibet or India. Travel by
foot or horseback was a pageant, a procession of pilgrims, entertainers, farmers, or lords making their way through snowy passes and dense forests, stopping to eat, to rest, to sing, and sometimes to dance the gentle, repetitive, slow-motion folk dances of the hills. Temples and colossal monastery-fortresses, the
dzongs
, the capitals of feudal warlords and warring regions not united under one hereditary ruler until early in this century, were also the centers of spiritual, legal, and even medical sustenance for all Bhutanese who could reach them. In smaller communities, monks and lamas were the sources of wisdom and healing for soul, mind, and body.

Not all of this is history, and that is part of Bhutan’s dilemma. People may be healthier and better educated and have a national airline to fly them away and roads to connect them to the Asian subcontinent. But many still travel on horseback, prostrate themselves in gloriously decorated temples, and ward off the curses of evil spirits with elaborately fashioned constructions of sticks and string placed outside the family home. Should this life be saved? And how?