I FIRST VISITED THE LAND OF THE THUNDER DRAGON IN THE YEAR of the female wood rooster. Flying to Bhutan was not something I had been looking forward to, but since trekking over the Himalayas wasn’t a realistic alternative, I had no choice but submit to the experience.

For my particular anxiety about this flight, which blighted my life for about sixteen weeks prior to departure, I blame Tintin in Tibet.⁵ This is a graphic novel by one of the towering literary geniuses of the twentieth century, the Belgian children’s author Hergé, whose meticulously illustrated tales of the boy reporter Tintin and his crime-busting, globe-trotting travels formed my most influential early reading material. Actually, thinking about it now, they were probably a good part of the reason why I grew up so keen to see the world. Tintin in Tibet opens with a plane crash in the Himalayas (Hergé was not an author who believed in hiding the adult world from his young readers), and since I had read all the Tintin books at least forty times and could recite every word of them from memory, I knew exactly what happened when you tried to fly a passenger plane over the Himalayas.

It didn’t help me much to learn that the country was named Druk Yul, or Land of the Thunder Dragon, because of the violent thunderstorms that tear down through the valleys from the Himalayan peaks.

I also wasn’t too happy to discover that only one airline flew to Paro, the country’s sole international airport: Druk Air (yep, Thunder Dragon Air). I was told, not reassuringly, that this was because the route is so challenging, only local pilots with a special certificate are permitted to fly it. Takeoff and landing are visual (that is, the plane is flown by the pilot, not by a computer), and a detailed knowledge of the terrain is essential. You have to know every twist and turn, the height and depth and orientation of every cliff face, every gorge, and every peak by sight, or else you’ll never find your way in or out of the maze of valleys.

At Bangkok, however, I was relieved to board a shiny brand-new Airbus A319 and not the postwar propeller-driven Douglas DC3 which Tintin in Tibet had led me to expect. The flight was quite something, with views of Mount Everest rearing out of the clouds as we climbed over the high Himalayas before our long slalom down through the maze of gorges and valleys to Paro, our wingtips appearing almost to brush the sheer rock walls that towered above us for the last part of the flight. The final, dramatic hairpin turn as we lined up for the runway was executed with great flair and precision by the pilots, or else I wouldn’t be here to tell the story, but given the choice I would rather eat six pounds of cold gravel than do it again.

The one thing I didn’t think very much about for the first few years of my career was what all this flying was doing to my carbon footprint, and it’s a sign of how attitudes are changing that now in 2020 I simply can’t talk about all this travel without mentioning the large environmental debt I’ve run up. I’ve flown the best part of two million miles during my working life, and although I have been driving an electric car and doing most of my European travel by train for some years, and thanks to videoconferencing now travel far less than I used to, I still need to plant around seven thousand trees to finish paying off my accumulated air travel debt. I hope to achieve this in the next two or three years.

Once safely on the ground and transported to the capital, Thimphu, I was warmly welcomed by the family who ran the guest house where I was to stay, and on my first evening I was served a wonderful soup with pieces of meat in it. My host, Dendhup Tshering, told me it was yak, and when I expressed my surprise that animals would be killed for food in a Buddhist country, he glanced at his wife and told me with a shy smile that even the smartest yaks can sometimes slip and fall over a cliff, and if he happened to be there when it fell, there was no harm in serving its meat to an honored guest.

It’s at moments like this when I feel such a rush of affection for humanity. No matter how diligently observant, no matter how saintly or self-sacrificing or disciplined our traditions demand us to be, the vast majority of us are still naughty children at heart, feebly and transparently trying to dodge the stern commandments that we insist on believing our scary gods have imposed on us, and then pleading with a charming smile not to be found out.

I don’t think I’ve been to a single country professing any religion—including the most austerely fundamentalist—without encountering this kind of innocent deception at one time or another. It’s one of a long list of blessedly disarming traits that make it such fun being yet another human being on planet Earth, if only we could stop setting ourselves impossible standards and pretending we are stronger, more perfect, less complex, and less contradictory than we are: the exterior sometimes so forbidding, the interior so adorably familiar.

Much later that night, I was awoken by a chorus of barking dogs at some unknown hour. (The people of the Thunder Dragon might shove the occasional yak over a cliff but they won’t harm stray dogs on any account, with the result that in some parts of town they outnumber the people. The atrocious manners of all Buddhist dogs show how well they know this.)

Now, I’m sure we’ve all had that disconcerting experience of waking up in the middle of the night and, for a second, not knowing where we are. But never until this moment had I woken up and not known who I was. It only lasted a second, any longer and it would have been terrifying. I literally had no idea who it was who might be witnessing this strange scene.

I (for want of a better pronoun) looked in bafflement around the long, green room, dimly lit by the glow of a funny old-fashioned electric radiator, saw the hand-woven rugs hanging on the walls, noted the snowy moonlit Himalayas through the uncurtained window, and listened to the barking dogs. Gradually it dawned on me that in the face of such immeasurably long odds, the only possible explanation for it all was that it was not me who was witnessing the scene. It was undoubtedly somebody much more likely: Dendhup Tshering perhaps, or his wife, or the driver who had picked me up from Paro earlier that day, or possibly even Tintin. The place existed, of course—any fool could see that—but it was simply too much to believe that I, Simon Anholt, should suddenly and for no reason have materialized in this bed and begun observing it. It served no conceivable purpose in the great plan of the universe. For a second I was in boggle overdrive.

I’d once had a similar experience in Morocco, on the way from Casablanca to Rabat in a rattling ancient Mercedes taxi. It was late at night and rather warm, and the elderly taxi driver had the radio on, playing what I think must have been a recitation of the Holy Qur’an in the Berber language. I’d never heard Tamazight spoken before, and it sounded like no other language I’d ever heard uttered—to my drowsy senses, somewhere between Arabic and Russian—and it began to hypnotize me. After an hour or so, I almost stopped being me, and there was nothing left but a disembodied experience of that taxi journey being had.

Later that morning, I was scheduled to give a talk to a group of officials from various ministries. Despite my disturbed night and safely reunited with my ego, I turned up in plenty of time at the Tashichho Dzong, the huge wooden monastery-fortress where many government departments are located. Over my head soared the magnificent triple-tiered golden roofs, the intricate and brightly painted wooden carvings that adorn every facet of this ancient building that dominates the city. I was met by a group of courteous and smiling officials, the women in their long kira dresses flapping in the icy wind that raced down from the peaks, the men in their gho, a short checkered coat not unlike a tartan dressing gown. National dress is compulsory in Bhutan: the country must be the absolute despair of Nike and Levi’s, one of the last places on earth where the population still refuses to wear American national dress. (At least it did so when I was last there, but I hear that jeans and sneakers are now tolerated underneath the gho and kira especially in the winter months, which is a bit of a pity for the tourists but probably no bad thing if you’re Bhutanese.)

I was led to a large upper chamber in the Tashichho Dzong where two hundred officials were already seated, quietly waiting for me to arrive. My host asked me politely if I would like to “use the conveniences.” (Very conveniently for those of us who don’t speak Bhutanese, nearly everybody in Bhutan speaks perfect British English since it is the language of instruction in their schools.) More out of reciprocal politeness than anything else, I assented and was shown to the smallest room in the palace.

Now, an interesting phenomenon I have noticed is that almost wherever I go in the world, Italian hardware has got there first: the doorknobs, taps, and light switches always seem to be made in Italy. This remained a mystery to me until I gave a seminar to the manufacturers’ association of the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, an organization representing some two thousand companies producing and exporting high-tech equipment. The manufacturing cluster around Bologna is one of the busiest in the world, where lots of those wonderful doorknobs, taps, and light switches come from.

I don’t think I have ever come across a group of such serious-minded businesspeople as these Italian exporters. Utterly at home anywhere on earth, with the confident charm and professionalism to win orders wherever they went, it was hardly surprising their products were so widely used. I was shocked to learn that even though the products produced in this region were often technically superior to those of their Swiss, German, or Japanese competitors, they were compelled to sell them more cheaply than their rivals, purely because of the expectation that Italians were less competent. Talk about country-of-origin effect. This absurd cliché, that Italians can only make food and fashion (oh, and the occasional supercar), effectively slashed the value of the country’s manufacturing exports by around 20 percent.

Back in the lavatory in the Tashichho Dzong, after what felt like a reasonable pause, I reached for the door handle, noticing with amusement that it was one of those round brass Italian contraptions with the locking mechanism integrated into the knob itself.

I turned the knob but nothing happened. Evidently it was the self-locking variety, so I gave the tiny catch in the center of the knob—infuriatingly hard to use with even slightly damp or cold hands and thus another small victory of the designer over the consumer—a twist to the left. Nothing. I gave it a twist to the right: again nothing. I pondered for a moment and decided to focus my mind on the problem at hand rather than waste energy on strong feelings. Over the next five minutes, I tried things on that door handle that did credit to the ingenuity of the human species. Nothing. I was locked in, and without outside help, my life was now indefinitely on hold.

At first I knocked politely on the door, hoping my hosts might be nearby, but there was no reply. I knocked louder. I banged with my fists and called out, but no sound of approaching footsteps disturbed the centuries of meditative calm that reigned in that peaceful palace. Clearly, everybody was sitting in polite silence in the conference room, waiting for me to return from the lavatory in my own good time.

Eventually, in desperation, I stuck my head out of the tiny window and called out to a group of men standing in the courtyard far below. They looked up in surprise. I explained my predicament in a voice which I hoped would somehow carry without being a shout. Though the sight of a pale, distressed European face calling anxiously in English from a tiny window in the upper story of a government building in Thimphu can’t have been a familiar one, they grasped the situation with commendable alacrity and bustled into the building.

After a minute or two, somebody arrived and, after knocking politely, tried the doorknob from the outside, but the door was well and truly stuck. After asking me courteously to step back, they began to attack it with feet, fists, and what sounded like heavy blunt instruments. I thought I could hear a sizable crowd gathering in the corridor.

I sat down on the only available seat and considered what I would say to the audience upon my release. Should I act as if nothing had happened, even though the enthusiastic demolition of a heavy teak door with solid brass Italian hinges cannot possibly have gone unobserved by the people in the conference room next door, and proceed in a dignified fashion with my talk? That seemed rather pompous behavior. Should I trust to the universality of humor, especially where lavatories are concerned, and make a joke about it? That was risky, since humor varies subtly from culture to culture and I ran the risk of coming across as coarse, culturally insensitive, or plain weird. Should I make a dash for Mr. Tshering’s guest house and hide there for the rest of my stay? This last idea was tempting but not practical, and I didn’t relish being chased through the streets of Thimphu by a delegation of anxious tartan-clad civil servants who knew the way much better than I did.

Before I could decide on a course of action, I was liberated and shepherded back into the conference room. It was decision time. I settled on a hybrid solution, starting my talk with an explanation of the country-of-origin effect, describing the impact this had—by way of a random example—on the doorknob on a lavatory door in a Bhutanese government building: perhaps because it was 20 percent cheaper than the German one, or perhaps because the Italian sales rep was so charming and knowledgeable, the purchasing department in Thimphu had made the fateful decision to go for the Italian product. The impacts of this small decision spread out across the universe, I explained, in a wave that began with our session starting fifteen minutes behind schedule, and ended with the Italian economy expanding at a faster rate than it otherwise might have done, but nevertheless earning lower foreign revenues than Germany’s. Truly, I concluded, this was a thoroughly globalized and interdependent world, and we must all now learn to live with the consequences.

During my stay, there were many discussions about the various ways in which Bhutan might increase its own foreign revenues without selling out to the standard capitalist-consumerist model, which the King of Bhutan was determined not to allow to contaminate the minds of his subjects. (Television had been banned until 1999 for the same reason.)

I have to admit that I felt some nostalgic sympathy for this approach, troubling though many Western commentators found it. Almost as soon as I arrived in this remarkably unspoiled country, I had a sense that it was in the process of being contaminated before my very eyes, mainly by the presence of the Western aid cohorts and their generally good intentions. The United Nations, which was prominent in Bhutan, appeared to be unconsciously spreading the virus of consumerism as the conquistadors had spread smallpox in the Americas. Their mean-looking Land Cruisers with knobbly tires and long whippy aerials tearing about the country, the mobile phones which they generously distributed to their local staff so everybody could stay constantly in touch, and which those staff then took back home and showed off to their admiring friends and families: it all looked like the beginning of the contagion. Not that I’d wish to deprive anyone in Bhutan of the advantages of modern technology or wealth, of course, and I was aware of a contradiction here which I have never fully resolved. A few years later, I was to argue for a deliberate release of the same virus in Afghanistan, since it felt like the most potent, most readily available, and least harmful antidote to the ignorance, poverty, darkness, and oppression that had reigned there, on and off, since the Middle Ages.

If Bhutan can make the transition to whatever degree of benign modernity it desires without losing too much of the social, cultural, spiritual, environmental, and human wealth it still possesses, that would be of value to us all.

This was a country that produced very little, so it didn’t have many choices when planning export strategies. It was a country that, in fact, depended on stamp collectors for a not insignificant part of its foreign revenues. They say that philately gets you nowhere, but money earned from the sale of Bhutanese postage stamps has been a mainstay of the economy since the 1960s, thanks to the efforts of one Burt Todd, an American from Pittsburgh, who created and ran the country’s highly successful and innovative Stamp Agency for many years and was responsible, among many other marvels, for a limited edition of musical postage stamps that could actually be played on a gramophone. (Now there’s a story that’s begging to be made into a movie.)

The minister of tourism explained to me that the kingdom would like to welcome more tourists to the country, but it could only be small numbers of wealthy tourists who trod carefully, respected the culture, spent decent amounts of money, and left no traces behind. They simply didn’t have the infrastructure for mass tourism, and what they knew of UK package holidaymakers in Spain or US spring breakers in Mexico made them fearful for the fragile fabric of their homeland.

The minister told me that they’d asked a European marketing consultant how they could best target these high-level visitors. He recommended a highly targeted global advertising campaign to run in the exclusive magazines that only such people read. It seemed like a sensible plan, except that unfortunately the cost of the campaign was around 1 percent of the country’s GDP, and did I have any slightly more affordable ideas?

A little reverse psychology suggested that they could earn money from this problem rather than spending it. Instead of begging rich people to visit Bhutan, it would be far better to tell them they couldn’t visit even if they wanted to. (If I know one thing about spoiled rich people, it’s that they absolutely cannot resist things they’re not allowed to have.) I suggested setting a stiff daily penalty for any foreigners wishing to contaminate the precious soil of Druk Yul with their western boots, perhaps on the order of a thousand dollars per day. The exact amount could be carefully calibrated in order to warn off the precise socioeconomic target they wished to attract.

Tourist taxes had been used before and in several countries had proved an effective way of offsetting the harm done by the tourist industry. But the idea of making the charge deliberately and explicitly punitive seemed more powerful, and although the amount of the charge as well as the language used to describe it was de-escalated before implementation, the income it has generated has helped Bhutan to become one of the most environmentally sustainable economies in the world. At the same time it has grown its tourism business at the modest rate it wanted, as well as making a statement of self-worth which many thousands of visitors continue to find not merely acceptable but irresistible. And every time somebody complains online about the charge (now a mere $250, to include accommodation), they are sending out a clear signal to anyone who takes pride in not being someone that scrimps and saves, that this is the destination for them. The skinflints continue to do Bhutan’s tourism marketing on its behalf, and the environment reaps the benefit.

Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness is of course the best-known example of its influence on the world. My view is that the idea of happiness as a measure of social progress is probably a necessary step toward a world that works, but only a preliminary one. Being more happy won’t head off climate change, halt a pandemic, or reduce inequality, even if “how happy can I be” is a good deal more productive for humanity than “how rich can I be.” Where we need to get to is “how happy can we be,” which is in fact rather closer to the original Buddhist conception behind it. It’s a collective rather than individual notion of fulfilment, but this subtlety has largely been lost on Western audiences, for whom subjective feelings of happiness probably have more to do with the number of electronic devices they own than the serenity they share with their community.

Sometimes countries instantly captivate your senses simply by the quality of their light and air. Chile definitely had this effect on me, as did Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand, so perhaps it’s a trick of the Southern Hemisphere.

The first time I went to Botswana, within a moment of stepping off the plane at Gaborone Airport into the bright sunshine and glittering air, I felt so full of hope and optimism and joie de vivre, I could hardly imagine ever wanting to be anywhere else (and considering that I have completely lost my sense of smell over the last twenty years, for reasons unknown, a place has to be truly special to work its magic on me through only four senses).

In Botswana, I was introduced to an important new dimension of the debate on economic development: the involvement of China and other Asian powers in Africa. China’s approach is markedly different from the classic aid-based approach of Western countries. It’s about doing business in Africa, investing in infrastructure, and in most cases is quite openly self-interested. China needs resources, and in Africa resources are cheap, so deals can be done.

Several of the African politicians I met over the years were positive about China’s involvement: Not having to deal with the burdensome conditions that Western countries and the international system often placed on aid was a real relief. (In many cases, however, the burdensome conditions involved the protection of human rights, anticorruption measures, and institutional reform. China’s view tended to be that these issues were none of its business.) They also, quite understandably, preferred being treated with respect as business partners rather than as objects of charity. And they felt that the deals were good ones, since they also delivered jobs for local people.

Part of the trouble is that they so often don’t deliver jobs for local people. China has lots of people as well as lots of money, and it tends to ship in its own workers to deliver its projects. I had a revealing conversation with a Chinese investor who’d just finished building a much-needed power station in Gaborone, which would doubtless make a difference to many lives in the capital. When I asked him why he didn’t train any local people to work on the project, he patiently explained that after this project there wouldn’t be another one, so there was no point in training them. I was so taken aback by the unfamiliar combination of total honesty and total cynicism, I had to spend several days processing his comment before I could begin to think about how I could or should have answered it. Not that it would have made any difference, I suspect.

As it happens, several more Chinese power stations have been built in Botswana since then, few of them entirely trouble-free. Stories of corruption, mismanagement, and poor-quality work surround each new venture. And one can’t overlook the fact that the power stations being built all over the developing world by China (three hundred of them in 2019), are all coal powered, so China is playing a leading role in ensuring that the developing world does at least as much damage to the earth’s climate as the developed world did during its phase of maximum growth. This is clearly not sustainable, and considering how severely China suffers from air pollution in its own cities, it’s surprising that it should be so enterprising about inflicting the same problem on other countries.

I also met with a handful of entrepreneurs in Botswana who were developing their own products and services, with the ambition to export them worldwide. Several years earlier, I’d written a book about “third world” entrepreneurs called Brand New Justice.⁶ Now I began to notice signs that the hope I’d expressed in that book—of successful consumer products coming from and bringing prosperity to developing countries—was beginning to come true. Meeting entrepreneurs across Africa who wanted to see their products consumed not just in Africa but worldwide, it started to feel believable that one day, the tide might turn, and real prosperity would be generated from all corners of the earth. Today in the West, we’re starting to get used to the idea that, in addition to our products being manufactured at minimal profit in developing countries, brand names—and consequently big margins—could come from such places too.

One of the factors inhibiting this change was the damage done—no doubt with good intentions—to the images and the prospects of African countries by aid celebrities like Bob Geldof and Bono, thanks to their habit of characterizing the whole continent as if it were one failing state. This kind of rhetoric is useful for generating charity, but it becomes problematic if what you really need to generate is investment, tourism, and trade. People will happily give some of their spare change to a country that has been presented to them as a basket case, but they won’t invest in it, go on holiday there, hire somebody from there, or buy a product made there, because of course they’d lose their shirt.

The countries that tend to suffer most from the generic image of Africa as a single failing state are the ones that perform better economically, and so depend much more on trade and tourism and less on aid. They have to shoulder the burden of an image earned by the least developed and most troubled countries on their continent, an image mercilessly promoted, reinforced, and milked by the aid industry in the developed world.

Botswana is one of the better examples of a successful and well-run African country, and it’s rightly proud of itself. The World Bank describes it today as “one of the world’s great development success stories. . . . Botswana has transformed itself, moving into the ranks of upper middle-income status to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with an average annual growth rate of about 9 percent.”⁷

Well, World Bank officials know this, but lots of people around the world don’t, and the government of Botswana felt it was about time they did. Moreover, the country was celebrating forty years of peaceful democracy since its independence from the United Kingdom, as confirmed by the international election-monitoring teams that come to scrutinize the process every time the country holds an election.

So one of my suggestions to the government of Botswana was that, next time there was a presidential election in the United States, Botswana should send its own election-monitoring team to Washington, DC, in order to ensure that the election of the next US president was free and fair. (Given the chaotic scenes in Florida during the 2000 election of George W. Bush, I felt sure this suggestion would be gratefully received.)

The Batswana fell about laughing at my proposal until I pointed out that the joke was at their expense, and in fact not a joke at all. My next suggestion, that the Botswana Air Force should overfly the poorer districts of Washington, DC, and drop sacks of rice out of the door, was considered to be more problematic, sadly.