Read So Close to Heaven for Free Online Page B

1907. They officially offered the crown to Ugyen Wangchuck and with it authority over both secular and some religious affairs. The first king’s coronation took place in December of that year. It was a splendid affair, with “a dense throng of spectators, monks and laymen” crowding the great hall at Punakha Dzong, which was lit with countless butter lamps, according to John Claude White, the British political officer who attended the coronation as London’s official representative. As a monastic band struck up the appropriate music, a crush of uninvited Bhutanese citizens tried to invade through the roof, where an openinghad been made for light and air, and were “repeatedly driven off by the lamas,” White wrote.
    Ugyen Wangchuck was by most accounts a shrewd and generous ruler with an informed interest in the world outside Bhutan. White, based in Sikkim, remarked on his first official mission to Bhutan, in 1905, that “Sir Ugyen is the only Bhutanese I have come across who takes a real and intelligent interest in general subjects, both foreign and domestic, and he neither drinks nor indulges in other vices.” The future king told White of his distress at losing many books from his large collection when a fire damaged the Dechen temple near Thimphu. “I held many long private conversations with the Tongsa,” White wrote a little patronizingly in his journal, “and was deeply impressed with his sense of responsibility and genuine desire to improve the condition of his country and countrymen.” The British political officer was moved by the penlop’s confession that he had thrown himself into reading and scholarship in an effort to overcome his heartbreak over the death of a young wife to whom he was deeply attached. Noticing that Ugyen Wangchuck’s eyesight was beginning to fail, White gave him a pair of his own reading glasses before taking leave of the penlop at the end of the mission.
    White, an avid and skilled photographer, took pictures of the Tongsa penlop in 1905 after the British investiture ceremony and again in 1907 after his coronation as king. The 1905 portrait shows a stocky, barefoot man with a thin mustache and wispy beard wearing a gho that appears to be made of brocaded satin. White described it as “a handsome robe of dark blue Chinese silk, embroidered in gold with the Chinese character
fu
, the sign emblematical of good luck.” Apart from his sword and raven crown, the Tongsa penlop sports the medal of the imperial British knighthood he has just been awarded. His bronzed round face is creased with a faint smile of self-assurance and pride. In 1907, the newly anointed king wore a robe of lighter blue brocade, his raven-headed crown, Western shoes, and long socks that disappeared beneath his gho. In the intervening years, he had made a trip to Calcutta, then the seat of the British colonial government of India. The shoes—various shoes—were seen more often, though not for the first time, after that trip. In 1911, Sir Ugyen also visited New Delhi to attend the glittering ceremonies celebrating the move of the British Indian government to the imposingnew imperial capital. Official New Delhi, with its wide Raj Path boulevard and elegant government buildings, is still Asia’s most impressive capital city.
    Ugyen Wangchuck lived and ruled until 1926, when he was succeeded by his son Jigme Wangchuck. By the time Jigme Wangchuck died in 1952, Britain’s South Asian empire had collapsed and four new nations had been created: India, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, the last of which would again fracture in 1971, spawning independent Bangladesh. India’s overwhelming size and the tendency of Indian political leaders to assume that they had inherited Britain’s imperial legacy posed new problems for Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal, the three Himalayan kingdoms that had never been colonized. Another, Ladakh, was already part of India (as were the smaller domains of Lahaul and Spiti), and Tibet was being