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blessing and encouragement of the British colonial government in India), Bhutan was at best a loosely united country with a three-hundred-year-old system of parallel religious and temporal leaders who left most local affairs in the hands of
penlops
, appointed regional governors. Early British chroniclers recorded how trips to the kingdom were often postponed or disrupted because of clashes between rival penlops, who had become feudal lords with bases in their respective widely scattered dzongs. From these fortresses, with high walls and huge protective gates, they forayed out to war on one another much like medieval European kings and princes. By the turn of the twentieth century, power had concentrated in two penlops, in Paro and Tongsa.
    Ugyen Wangchuck, whose family came from the Bumthang area in central Bhutan, was the penlop of Tongsa, a title kept alive today by Bhutanese crown princes. Penlop Ugyen Wangchuck had used both his military and his diplomatic skills to unite the country and best his chief rival, the Paro penlop. Ugyen Wangchuck’s masterstroke internationally was to back (and join) a successful British expedition against Tibet in 1904, and then help draft the Anglo-Tibetan accord that followed. The British, rulers of neighboring India at the time, had immense power in the region, and they became his strong supporters.
    Ugyen Wangchuck’s decision to make common cause with imperial Britain, which had in the previous century snatched from his father, Jigme Namgyal, a large area of land along the Indian border claimed by the Bhutanese, could have been a difficult one. The Tibetans were virtually kith and kin (barring about a century of aggression during and after the unification of Bhutan in the 1600s), and Tibet was the wellspring of Bhutanese Tantric Buddhist culture. On the other hand, Tibet’s attitude did not seem entirely friendly at the turn of the twentieth century. Alu Dorji, a former Thimphu penlop and an old enemy of Ugyen Wangchuck, had been in exile in Tibet plotting to draw Tibetans into a campaign to undermine the new strongman of Bhutan. Another of theTongsa penlop’s rivals, the Paro penlop, had disapproved of the British march against Lhasa. His career paid the price.
    Ugyen Wangchuck, on the other hand, went on to collect a British honor, the medal of a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, and the crown of Bhutan, an unusual embroidered cap with a wide upturned brim all around. Ostentatious jewels have no place in Bhutan’s crown or, for that matter, in royal Bhutanese court life. The crown, which photographs of Ugyen Wangchuck show him wearing several years before his formal coronation, is topped with the head of a raven. The raven is a manifestation of the preeminent local guardian deity, Gompo Jarodonchen, a form of Mahakala, the black guardian god. The room or corner set aside for Mahakala in a monastery is barred to women, Bhutanese and foreign alike. The abbot at Tashigang Dzong—instinctively (if surprisingly) aware, as are most Bhutanese, that this kind of discrimination requires an explanation—made a great effort to explain the rationale to me.
    “Especially the monks here have to emphasize celibacy throughout the life,” he said through the regional administrator who had brought me into the monastery, causing the abbot a flicker of anxiety at the outset. “They have to refrain from the women,” he went on, as we hovered at the door of Mahakala’s temple, one of many shrines in the dzong. “Having contact with the women, they land up in human misery. And that particular deity is their deity. It’s not that the deity is against women. But when we want to renounce the world, the first thing we give up is the women. This is the first reason. There are many other reasons.” He rushed on to the next shrine without elaborating.
    The enabling act that made possible the formal establishment of a hereditary monarchy in Bhutan came in a meeting of lay and religious leaders in