Word: bhutan
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When I first set foot in Bhutan 16 years ago, the "Land of Hidden Treasures" defined its relation to development very simply: it was not, and would never become, Nepal. "Women who will have sex with anyone. Pot, marijuana. People sleeping in the street"-I can still remember a Bhutanese official's voice shaking as he described the "low-class" foreigners his nation had watched streaming into its Himalayan neighbor. Nepalmed by what had come in through its open doors, a Kathmandu that had, up till 1955, barely seen a road was cluttered with Nirvana Tours agencies, 50-cents...
...Bhutan, by contrast, had no television then, no daily newspapers, only medieval buildings. Its capital, Thimphu, basked in a stainless quiet in which everyone wore traditional, medieval clothing (as they still do), and fewer tourists arrived in a year than pile into Disneyland in an hour. The young King Jigme Singye Wangchuk was pursuing a policy of "Gross National Happiness" which said that peace was as important as plenty, and immaterial needs were at least as important as material. There is a point of diminishing returns in development, he was suggesting (in terms that more and more people now heed...
...told us) is change. Suddenly, Nepal, haunted by violent Maoist insurgents on the one hand and an autocratic King on the other, is the country that is difficult for tourists to enjoy, its streets silent after dark, its character less free and easy than stuck and stricken. As for Bhutan, its citizens can now take in Sex and the City on TV, watch foreigners check into Aman luxury hotels for $700 a night, and hear about the local incarnate lama who is fêted in Hollywood for his movie The Cup. Thimphu is the place on which foreign sights...
...neither Bhutan nor Nepal were ever quite so transparent as outsiders liked to suppose. Kathmandu might have boasted an Old Etonian King, the finest apple pies this side of Iowa and all the mongrel props of what could be called Peace Corps imperialism, but it is still technically illegal to proselytize in Nepal, and as recently as 1990, up to 175 people were languishing in prison for spreading their Christianity. Freedom was always more in the eye of the foreign beholder than in the heart of the beheld. As for Bhutan's purity, it was to some extent imposed from...
...fairy tale in which one woman opens her doors to everyone and the other lives like a nun inside a convent. King Gyanendra of Nepal and his Maoist enemies now seem to believe that what Nepalis most need is an infusion of discipline and authority. The people of Bhutan, meanwhile, peer shyly out at a world that fascinates them, in part, through its very chaos. And even as the people of Nepal loudly protest their King's taking of all power into his own hands, the citizens of Bhutan are mourning their own monarch's announcement two months ago that...