Bhutan

A Himalayan kingdom that opened to the world on its own terms and measures its success by something other than income. Bhutan was unified in the seventeenth century by Ngawang Namgyal, a Tibetan lama who fled a succession dispute and built a state of fortress-monasteries, the dzongs, that still serve as administrative centres. It avoided colonisation, conceding foreign relations to Britain in 1910 and then to India, and the Wangchuck dynasty has reigned since 1907. Television and the internet were permitted only in 1999, the last country to allow them. The fourth king coined Gross National Happiness in the 1970s as an alternative measure of development, and the idea, easily mocked, is written into the constitution as a directive on policy. That same king voluntarily abdicated in 2006 and imposed democracy on a population that did not ask for it, with the first elections in 2008. Bhutan is carbon negative, absorbing more than it emits, with a constitutional minimum of sixty per cent forest cover. Tourism is limited by a daily sustainable development fee. A large Nepali-speaking population in the south was expelled or fled in the early 1990s, which the happiness framing does not cover. Thimphu is the capital. The country has about 780 thousand people in thirty-eight thousand square kilometres. Dzongkha is the national language. Gangkhar Puensum, its highest peak, is the tallest unclimbed mountain in the world, closed on religious grounds. Archery is the national sport. The country has no traffic lights in its capital, an experiment with one having been abandoned by public preference for the policeman it replaced.

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