So Close to Heaven Read Free

buildings could have materialized from illustrations in old fairy tales.
    The land the Bhutanese inhabit, wedged between the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, could also be drawn from the pages of a storybook. Spread over soaring icy mountains, black-dark gorges echoing with the roar of rushing water, emerald valleys silent under the sun, and forests rustling day and night with life of every kind, Bhutan is the size of Switzerland but has fewer than a million people, no cities as we know them, and no more than half a dozen paved roads of any significance. More people walk or travel by horseback than ride in motorized vehicles of any kind; topography ensures that this transportation pattern will endure indefinitely. The leg muscles of the Bhutanese, men and women, are magnificent. It takes strength and energy to live, as most Bhutanese do, at altitudes above five thousand feet, sometimes in villages so impossibly high above the valleys they farm that a lowlander can only stand and stare in disbelief at the precipitous passage between the warmth of home and the necessities and temptations provided by the outside world. And then urban life may be represented by no more than a ramshackle market stall at the side of the nearest (a relative term here) road. For the Bhutanese man or woman who leaves such an environment for a trip abroad, international travel is the easy part, or so Ugyen Dorji of the Jichu Drake Bakery told me with astonishing matter-of-factness as he described how he, a village boy, was shipped to Austria to be trained in pastrymaking under one of the more unusual national human resources policies. For him, the Austrian Alps were hardly worth writing home about.
    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 oneseems 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