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By Root 696 0

in the United States. Bhutan is not a checklist kind of vacation on which you hit the hot spots, not an easy place, not a luxurious place to adore. It has many flaws, and it is rife with contradictions. It doesn’t boast the typical assets common to vacation destinations, such as plentiful sunshine twelve months a year, or expert chefs who avail themselves of the bountiful fields (if you happen to be a fan of chanterelles and fiddlehead ferns, time your visit during the short summer season when they are as plentiful as kudzu). Bhutan may be simple and unspoiled, in the way rural America might have been at the turn of the twentieth century. With a tour guide beside you, it may seem like the promised Shangri-la, some sort of fairy tale, with endless miles of untouched land and vistas of mountains and trees so lush it’s hard to imagine they’re real. But it is poor. It is rough. And the sum total of the good and the bad and the strange combine to render Bhutan captivating and magnificent.

THE APRIL 1914 issue of National Geographic magazine is filled with advertisements for modern innovations that herald an era of convenience and speed and eroding boundaries: motorcars and tires, round-the-world steamship vacations, newfangled conveniences such as vacuum cleaners and electricity-powered refrigerators and canned soup. But the eighty-eight-page photo-essay that is central to this particular issue is the Rosetta stone for an odd chapter in Bhutan’s history. It offered the magazine’s 330,000 subscribers the first-ever introduction to the kingdom, a place only a handful of outsiders had seen with their own eyes and few others had even considered.

The title of the story was dreamily evocative: “Castles in the Air.” Its author was a British political officer named John Claude White, commander of the Indian Empire. White had initially been assigned to oversee neighboring Sikkim, and participated in the failed 1903 British invasion of Tibet, euphemistically referred to in the history books as the Young-husband Expedition. It was during that mission that White met Ugyen Wangchuck, a powerful Bhutanese figure who had managed to unite his people after years of internal strife. Wangchuck wanted to ensure his country remained independent of its powerful and enormous neighbors. Keeping the peace with the British agent for India was one way to maintain sovereignty. When Wangchuck was installed as Bhutan’s first king in 1907, White was his invited guest dignitary.

In the article, White details how with an entourage of “coolies, elephants, mules, ponies, donkeys, yaks, [and] oxen,” he traipsed around the region that India had dismissed as a “tangle of jungle-clad and fever-stricken hills,” “a region not sufficiently characteristic to merit special exploration.” He found plenty to explore—and document. With a thirteen-by-ten-foot camera rig that took three mules to carry, he exposed dozens of plate-glass images of pristine mountain vistas, as well as of the king and his subjects. Many of these delicate negatives improbably survived the rocky months-long journey around and out of the country.

His descriptions of the untouched land before him read like a dispatch from another universe, as if he were observing another species: “The Bhutanese are fine, tall, well-developed men, with an open, honest cast of face, and the women are comely, clean, and well dressed and excellent housekeepers and managers,” he wrote. “It is impossible to find words to express adequately the wonderful beauty and variety of scenery I met with during my journeys, the grandeur of the magnificent snow peaks, and the picturesqueness and charm of the many wonderful jongs, or forts, and other buildings I came across; but I hope my photographs may.…”

No doubt his haunting images of frozen waterfalls and water-propelled prayer wheels; of a smiling, barefoot, gho-clad king; and of an odd, rare goat-antelope called a takin captivated many an imagination. They certainly caught the eye of a National Geographic reader in El Paso, Texas, a woman named Kathleen Worrell. And they might