When my husband Namgay and I married, I told him I had a master’s degree in writing with a concentration in fiction. “What’s fiction?” he asked, looking genuinely puzzled.
I laughed, thinking he was making a joke about the value of an MFA, which would have been fair. My dad used to say my MFA and US$10 would buy me a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Namgay wasn’t joking. He wasn’t familiar with the word, not the way I meant it—a category of writing built entirely on made up stories, arranged to feel like they’re true. It wasn’t so much a gap in his English, but a trait I’d noticed early on in my life in Bhutan.
Bhutanese aren’t so picky about the difference between fiction and non-fiction. I guess if you pressed them on it, they might make some kind of judgement, but how they and I look at the world differs: me parsing a dualistic black-and-white difference between myth and reality, truth and fiction, and they not so much.
I’ll admit I was sort of delighted. It was a gap in the whole architecture in which I’d been trained to think; real on one side, invented on the other. A wall stands between them that every writing workshop I’ve ever sat in assumed was simply there, load-bearing, permanent.
The wall isn’t there in Bhutan. Or if it is, it’s a much lower wall than the one I grew up with—easy to step over without even breaking a sweat.
We’ve been talking about something related for months now; at the vegetable market, at dinner, with friends, on social media. The King wants to build 108 stupas in a single day, and by now everyone in the country is on board, enchanted, energized, amazed, and ready to pitch in. I’ve done the math over and over, and still can’t quite make it add up. We’re edging toward myth, fiction, a story bigger than life.
On 1 November, along a river in Gelephu called the Mao Chhu, 108 chortens will go up at once, each one 15 meters tall, spaced 108 meters apart, running 12 kilometers down the valley. Forty thousand volunteers are expected. There will be farmers, monks coming out of retreat, schoolchildren, retirees, planeloads of Bhutanese flying home from Australia just to help lift stone. No special skills are required. You just have to show up.
The math still doesn’t work. Fifteen meters, the height of each of the 108 stupas, is a five-story building. Twelve kilometers is most of the walk from our house into town and back again, three times. And they intend to finish all of it, all 108 stupas, in a day.
There’s precedent. Thirteen centuries of it. In the seventh century, Songtsen Gampo, a Tibetan king, built 108 temples across the Himalayas in a single day, and two of them are still standing in Bhutan right now. Kyichu Lhakhang is in Paro, and Jambay Lhakhang is in Bumthang, places I’ve visited many times, part of this older, stranger claim. In Bhutan, we don’t question whether the king did build 108 temples all through the Himalayas. We do believe there was some magic afoot. In Bhutan I’ve learned that some things are simply true and alive, whether or not the modern mind can verify them.
Where I came from, you’re supposed to document a story like that before you’re allowed to use it. Did it happen or didn’t it? History gets one shelf, legend gets another, and a responsible person keeps them separate. I’ve been turning the Songtsen Gampo story over since I first heard it, and it reads like myth because it almost certainly is—the kind of story that grows in the telling, generation after generation, until nobody can quite say where the history ends and the legend begins. Here, the sorting doesn’t seem to be the point.
What I do know is that our current King has decided to make the myth literal again. Only he’s not retelling it. He’s building it. Where Songtsen Gampo has passed into legend, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is standing in the actual mud along banks of the Mao Chhu, in an actual year, with actual engineers and actual volunteers, and an actual deadline. He has taken a story nobody could verify and turned it into a story everybody will be able to check. Come 2 November, the 108 chortens will either be standing or they won’t. I believe they will.
It takes a particular kind of will. I’ve watched this King move Bhutan through enormous change in his reign, the shift toward democracy, Gelephu Mindfulness City itself, a whole new economic vision for a small country that could easily have remained cautious in its ambitions. He’s not a man who builds monuments for his own sake. He seems to be a man who looks at what a myth once claimed was possible and asks, plainly: Why not now? Why not us?
The chortens themselves are called Jangchub Chortens, stupas of enlightenment. They mark a very specific moment, not a life, not a teaching, but the instant the Buddha sat still under demons and distraction and simply didn’t move. That’s the whole story. Everything tried to unseat him. The Buddha remained. He wasn’t going anywhere. I feel emotional even thinking about it, because Bhutan is so small and so vulnerable. I know that His Majesty understands completely this vulnerability in geopolitics, in environment, in a population, in every way. He is telling the world that Bhutan isn’t going anywhere.
I find that detail lodged in me more than the engineering does. A nation is about to spend a single day building 108 monuments to the idea of not being unseated. I think about that against everything else happening in the world right now—the noise of it, the way staying calm anywhere these days can feel like its own kind of stubborn, physical labor.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of money involved. The cost of each of the 108 stupas is US$200,000. More than 70 of the 108 have already secured sponsorship, and there is real, precise structure to the giving. Individual Premium Sponsorship over US$200,000 lets the sponsor choose a specific stupa number and have their name inscribed. Individual Full Sponsorship, exactly US$200,000, carries the same recognition. Shared Sponsorship, a minimum of US$20,000, lets multiple people jointly fund one stupa, aimed at families and Dharma communities. Community Offering welcomes any amount at all, fully open.
According to Kuensel, one of Bhutan’s newspapers, among the contributors is a tour guide named Pelden Dorji, whose family lost their livelihood when COVID shut down Bhutan’s tourism industry in 2020. The King’s own relief fund, Druk Gyalpo’s Kidu, helped them through that crisis, as it did for many Bhutanese who lost their footing in the pandemic. Now Pelden Dorji’s family has come back. They’re on their feet, and they’ve contributed roughly US$940 toward Project 108. It’s a genuinely small amount next to a US$200,000 stupa, but the energy and the heart and the generosity it represents makes it an equally powerful gesture.
Money is coming from everywhere. Small or large donations all combine, and it is so much a part of the Bhutanese spirit to pour their savings and their hearts into this amazing, crazy, important project. Everyone is willing to help.
I remember Namgay’s blank look at the word “fiction,” and I smile. It’s very satisfying, living in a place that looks at life so directly that it never developed much use for the wall I was trained to build between what happened and what didn’t. Myths usually stay myths because nobody is foolish enough or determined enough to test them against the real world. On 1 November, this one will be tested with a tape measure and a deadline and 40,000 pairs of hands. I plan to be there when it is.
Related features from BDG
30,000 People and a Jar of Peanut Butter
Bhutan: Where the Tigers Found Refuge
Temporal Rules: Bergson, the Buddha, and My Husband’s Missing Birthday
