In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon: Happiness, History, and Environment in a Changing Bhutan

Part of the ASIANetwork Books series.

A journey through Bhutan that looks at the Buddhist mountain kingdom’s recent history, gross national happiness, ethnic conflicts, and biocultural heritage

Landlocked, mountainous, and surrounded by global giants India and China, Bhutan has provided remarkable leadership on both climate action and human happiness, despite its pre-2023 status as a least-developed nation. Bhutan was the first country to be internationally recognized as carbon neutral; it is also the birthplace of “Gross National Happiness” (GNH), a pointed alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a means of measuring the success of national policies in promoting citizens’ wellbeing. Yet Bhutan has also been a site of ethnic conflict, with roughly tens of thousands people displaced into refugee camps in the 1990s and eventually resettled abroad. 

International views on Bhutan tend to be sharply split between admiration for its democratizing development strategies and opposition to its human rights abuses—a division partly maintained by Bhutan’s tight limits on immigration and foreign travel within the country. In the first book-length study of its kind, In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon explores the tensions and contradictions of Bhutan’s rapid political and economic transformation from the perspective of a Fulbright scholar helping start a new master’s program in the remote east of the country. 

Mingling personal narrative with historical context to engage undergraduate students and general readers, In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon explores Bhutan’s Vajrayana Buddhist heritage and ongoing embrace of tradition alongside development, the country’s newly minted democracy amidst a complicated history of citizenship and belonging, and the challenges the nation faces in a period of increasing globalization. Betsy Bolton further explores Bhutan’s recent events surrounding the 1990s expulsion of the Lhotshampa people and the development of GNH in the early 2000s. From here, Bolton illuminates how these historical narratives and issues have impacted Bhutanese citizens and students through stories gathered at educational and artistic institutions, festivals and community events. In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon is a fresh, accessible approach to Bhutanese history and will interest general readers as well as scholars of Asia, history, economics, sociology, and environmental studies.

Reviews
“Betsy Bolton’s work, In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, is a compelling study of the complexity of Bhutanese political, social, and religious practices. Exploring Bhutan’s strong emphasis on preserving its natural environment and long-standing religious traditions, Bolton includes the perspectives of historians, economists, and policy analysts as she discusses important events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition, Bolton invites the reader into Bhutan in a more personal way by sharing many of her own experiences getting to know people while teaching classes at a college located in a remote area of the country.”
– Catherine Benton, Lake Forest College

“A rigorously researched yet also accessible and personal investigation of the first officially carbon neutral country on the planet—and what we might learn from it. A necessary book for our time.”
– Rachel Pastan, author of In the Field and Alena

“Filled with colorful details, honest and intimate—Bolton offers a spiritually sensitive and analytically sophisticated distillation and critique of ideologies shaping modernity and tradition in Bhutan.”
– Nancy Neiman, Scripps College

About the Author
Betsy Bolton teaches English and Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College. She has served as a Fulbright scholar to Morocco (2013-4) and Bhutan (2017-8), where she facilitated community digital storytelling projects and created mini-documentaries of traditional crafts.