Place · fortress-monastery & capital · Bhutan
Punakha Dzong
Built in 1637–38 by Ngawang Namgyal at the confluence of the Pho Chhu and Mo Chhu, and the seat of Bhutan's government until 1955. It is the country's second-oldest dzong and its most consequential building: the first king was crowned here in 1907 and the treaty with British India was signed here in 1910. The dzong form itself — a fortress, a monastery and an administration in one whitewashed mass — is Bhutan's distinctive architectural contribution.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.582, 89.863
Worth knowing
It has burned or flooded at least seven times, most recently in 1994 when a glacial lake burst up the Pho Chhu — so the building has spent much of its life being repaired by the state it houses.
Connections (2)
- Institutional successionRumtek Monastery, Sikkim
Rumtek in Sikkim and Punakha in Bhutan are the two seats the Kagyu order established on the Indian and Bhutanese sides of the eastern Himalaya, and both are exile institutions in their way — Rumtek rebuilt from 1966 as the Karmapa's seat after Tibet closed, Punakha founded in 1637 by a hierarch who had fled a Tibetan succession dispute twenty years earlier. Between them they hold the Kagyu libraries, relics and ordination lines that Tibet itself stopped housing.
- Imperial administration ofNgawang Namgyal (the Zhabdrung)
Punakha is what Ngawang Namgyal built his state out of. Arriving in 1616 as a refugee from a Tibetan succession dispute, he raised the dzongs at Simtokha, Punakha, Wangdue and Paro, beat off repeated Tibetan and Mongol invasions, wrote the Tsa Yig code, and set up the dual government of Zhabdrung and Desi that ran Bhutan until 1907. Punakha was the seat of it until 1955, and the 1907 coronation and the 1910 treaty with British India both happened inside it.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Punakha Dzong”. Treaty of Punakha, 1910; Michael Aris, Bhutan (1979); Bhutan Department of Culture records.
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