Living in Bhutan | The Nation That Measured Happiness

Living in Bhutan — The Nation That Measured Happiness | 4K Documentary

Deep in the eastern Himalayas sits a country of fewer than 800,000 people — the last Buddhist kingdom in the world, and the only nation on Earth that measures its success through a formal happiness index.

In a farmhouse in the Punakha Valley, a woman pours butter tea into wooden bowls before the sun clears the eastern ridge. The kettle has been on the stove since four. The dog has not moved. The first prayer of the day is still a mountain away.

Higher up the valley, at a monastery three thousand metres above her, a fourteen-year-old novice lights a single butter lamp in a darkened hall and begins the morning prayers — the same prayers his teacher recited fifty years ago.