Bhutan

Bhutan, officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked country in South Asia in the Eastern Himalayas, bordering China's Tibet Autonomous Region to the north and India to the south, with a population of over 800,000 across 38,394 square kilometers and Thimphu, home to close to 15 percent of the population, as its capital and largest city. It is a democratic constitutional monarchy with a king as head of state and a prime minister as head of government, while the Je Khenpo leads the state religion of Vajrayana Buddhism, which spread to Bhutan from Bengal's Pala Empire in the first millennium. In the sixteenth century Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal unified Bhutan's valleys into a single state, defeated three Tibetan invasions and established a government of theocratic and civil administrators, and the Wangchuck dynasty later emerged as the monarchy, entering a British-advised protectorate-like arrangement under the 1910 Treaty of Punakha and a 1949 treaty with newly independent India. Bhutan joined the United Nations in 1971, and its 2008 constitution established a parliamentary government with an elected National Assembly and National Council; it ranked third in South Asia on the Human Development Index in 2020 and as the region's most peaceful country on the Global Peace Index in 2024, though melting glaciers from climate change are a growing concern given the country holds some of the world's largest hydropower water reserves.