National Memorial Chorten

The National Memorial Chorten is the most-used religious building in Thimphu and the easiest to fit into a day. It stands on an open lawn near the centre of the city: a whitewashed Tibetan-style chorten with a gilded spire, ringed by a path that is never empty.

Built for the third King

The chorten was completed in 1974 in memory of Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, the third Druk Gyalpo, who died in 1972 and is remembered as the architect of modern Bhutan — the King who ended isolation, abolished serfdom and brought the country into the United Nations. He had himself wanted to build a chorten representing the mind of the Buddha; after his death his mother and the government completed it as his memorial.

It is built to the Nyingma tradition, and its interior is a dense programme of tantric paintings and statues arranged over several floors — a teaching object rather than a decorative one.

Why it is always busy

What makes the chorten worth an hour is not the architecture but the use. From early morning, Thimphu's older residents walk clockwise around it, turning the large prayer wheels set into the boundary, telling beads, and sitting on the benches in the sun. Coming here is the closest a visitor gets to ordinary devotional life in the capital without intruding on it.

Go early if you want the light and the crowd together. It sits within a few minutes' drive of nearly everything else on a Thimphu day, which is why it appears on essentially every itinerary that passes through the city.