In a Himalayan kingdom that measures national success in happiness rather than productivity, a young king and his family are doing something rather remarkable — being royal in a way that feels entirely, genuinely human.
There is something rather wonderful about a monarchy that nobody is rushing to analyse.
Bhutan does not generate the breathless coverage of the British royal family, or the constitutional anxieties of the Japanese imperial household, or the diplomatic intrigue of the Jordanian court. It sits quietly in the eastern Himalayas, sandwiched between India and China, with a population of under a million people and a royal family that has spent the better part of two decades building something I find myself returning to again and again when I think about what monarchy can be at its very best: a genuine connection between a royal house and the people it serves.
King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is forty-six years old. He studied at Oxford and Wheaton College in Massachusetts. He was crowned in 2008 at the age of twenty-eight, having already served as acting head of state for several years following his father’s abdication. He married Jetsun Pema in 2011 — she was twenty-one, he was thirty-one, and the wedding was, by all accounts, as close to a fairy tale as real life tends to produce. They have three children: Crown Prince Jigme Namgyel, and younger siblings Prince Ugyen and Princess Sonam Yangden. I find myself rather charmed by this family every time I read about them.
In April 2026, the royal family undertook a visit to eastern Bhutan — one of the more remote and rarely visited regions of an already little-visited kingdom — attending the second edition of the Rhododendron Festival in the highland village of Sheytemi in Merak, Trashigang. The festival, held at an altitude of around 2,900 metres above sea level, celebrates the flowering season when Bhutan’s remarkable rhododendron species come into bloom. Bhutan has approximately 46 species of rhododendron, the majority found in precisely these highland areas. Over 8,000 people attended. The programme included traditional dances, singing, games, and displays of local produce unique to the region.
The King and Queen attended with all three children.
I want to pause on that detail because it matters. This was not a state occasion or a diplomatic necessity. It was a family visiting a remote corner of their kingdom to participate in a local festival that most of the world has never heard of. The Crown Prince, the younger prince, and the little princess were there — in the highlands, at altitude, at a community celebration that required genuine effort to attend. This is, I think, what the relationship between a monarchy and its people looks like when it is working as it should.
Bhutan is, of course, famously the country that invented Gross National Happiness as a measure of national progress — the idea, pioneered by King Jigme’s father, that a nation’s wellbeing cannot be measured in economic output alone but must account for cultural preservation, environmental sustainability, good governance, and the living standards of its people. It is a philosophy that has attracted considerable international attention and a certain amount of gentle scepticism from economists. One can hold both responses simultaneously. What is harder to dismiss is the evidence that it reflects something genuinely felt about how the Bhutanese monarchy understands its own purpose.
Queen Jetsun Pema is particularly worth noting. She was nineteen when she began appearing publicly alongside the King, twenty-one at their wedding, and has spent the years since building a profile focused almost entirely on education, child welfare, and environmental conservation. She is not, by any measure, a passive royal consort. She is a woman who has taken the weight of her position seriously from an exceptionally young age and carried it with what appears, from every available account, to be considerable grace.
The Bhutanese royal family does not maintain the kind of public presence that generates daily coverage. They do not have the media infrastructure of the British palace or the social media fluency of the Jordanian court. What they have instead is something rarer and, in my experience, more durable: the appearance of a royal family that actually likes each other, actually believes in what they are doing, and actually turns up — to highland festivals, to remote villages, to the ordinary life of their kingdom — because they want to.
There is a particular quality to institutions that understand their own purpose. One can’t help but notice it. And one finds, rather unexpectedly, that a small kingdom in the Himalayas has it in considerable measure.
I suspect we will be hearing a great deal more about Bhutan’s royal family in the years to come. I find I am rather looking forward to it.
Charlotte Ashby is Crown & Court’s Culture and Lifestyle Editor. A country house enthusiast and unapologetic admirer of tradition, she writes about the way royals actually live — the homes, the rituals, and the family moments behind the pageantry.
“Behind every crown is a family — and families are always interesting.”
