Paro Penlop

The Paro Penlop (Dzongkha: སྤ་རོ་དཔོན་སློབ་, sPa ro dPon sLob), sometimes rendered Parob, was the governor of the western districts of Bhutan under the country's pre-1907 chhoesi dual system. The office was one of two great regional governorships — the other being the Trongsa Penlop — that between them dominated Bhutanese politics from the late 17th century until the founding of the monarchy. Its seat was Rinpung Dzong in the Paro valley, and its jurisdiction took in the western trade corridor to Tibet through the Chumbi valley and southward to the Bengal duars. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries the Paro Penlop was the wealthiest officeholder in Bhutan. The civil wars of 1882–1885 ended its independence, and in 1907 it was absorbed into the new hereditary kingship as a subordinate post.

Origins and place in the dual system

After Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal consolidated his authority over the western valleys in the 1620s and 1630s, he organised conquered territory around fortified dzongs answerable to the Drukpa state at Punakha. Paro fell under Drukpa control in 1644 after a campaign against the local Jaba lords, and in 1645–46 the Zhabdrung directed the construction of a new fortress on a bluff above the Paro Chhu, on the site of an older monastery he had received from the Hungrel lama. The new fortress, consecrated in 1646, was named Rinpung Dzong ("fortress of the heap of jewels") and became the administrative and monastic centre of the western region.

The first holder of the Paro governorship was installed shortly after the dzong's consecration; later chronicles place the building of the central utse tower in 1649, "in the time of the first penlop of Paro." From its inception the office had a different character from that of the Trongsa Penlop, founded in 1647 in the central east. Trongsa was a frontier command, established to push Drukpa authority into Bumthang and the eastern districts and answerable in practice only to the Zhabdrung's regents. Paro, by contrast, lay in the cultural and economic heartland of the western state, within easy reach of Punakha and the Je Khenpo's monastic establishment, and its penlop was appointed and dismissed by the Druk Desi rather than self-perpetuating in a single lineage.

This appointive character had two consequences that shaped the office for the next two and a half centuries. It made the Paro Penlopship more closely entangled with the central government and the religious hierarchy than its Trongsa rival. And it made it a prize over which the leading aristocratic families of western Bhutan continually competed, since incumbents could be displaced when the balance at Punakha shifted.

Jurisdiction and economic base

At its widest the Paro Penlop's jurisdiction covered the Paro valley, the high pastoral district of Haa to its west, and stretches of the Thimphu and Wang valleys whenever the dzongpens of Thimphu and Punakha were too weak to assert themselves independently. Its southern reach extended down the Amo Chhu and Wang Chhu watersheds towards the Bengal frontier, where Bhutan claimed sovereignty over the western duars until they were annexed by British India after the Duar War of 1864–65.

The economic base of the office rested on three pillars. The first was the agricultural revenue of the Paro valley itself, the largest tract of irrigated paddy land in pre-modern Bhutan and the source of the rice tribute carried each year to Punakha. The second was the customs revenue of the western trade corridor. Caravans of Tibetan wool, salt, gold dust and musk crossing the Tremo La and Chumbi routes paid tolls in Paro before continuing south to the Bengal markets at Rangpur and later Siliguri; the same caravans returned northwards with Indian cotton, indigo, sugar and metalware, again passing through Paro. The third was the network of monastic and aristocratic estates clustered around the religious sites of the valley — Kyichu, Taktshang, Dungtse and others — which provided manpower and grain.

Cash income from this trade was substantially higher than the largely in-kind tributes available to the Trongsa administration from central and eastern Bhutan, and 18th- and early 19th-century European travellers consistently described Paro as the wealthier seat. George Bogle, who visited Bhutan in 1774 on behalf of the East India Company, recorded that the Paro Penlop was reckoned the second man in the country after the Druk Desi, and that his court had the fuller treasury.

Rinpung Dzong and Ta Dzong

The institutional home of the office was Rinpung Dzong, a five-storey fortress whose battered white walls dominate the lower Paro valley from a spur above the Paro Chhu. The dzong housed both the penlop's secular administration and the district monastic body, in the standard chhoesi pattern, with the central utse tower reserved for the religious community and the surrounding courtyards for civil offices, granaries and the penlop's own residence. Rinpung remains the administrative seat of Paro Dzongkhag and the home of the Paro rabdey; the architectural and religious detail is treated in the dedicated article on the dzong.

Above the fortress, on a spur some 150 metres higher, stands the Ta Dzong ("watchtower dzong"), a circular building completed in 1649 by the first Paro Penlop as a defensive lookout over the dzong and the routes into the valley. The Ta Dzong served this military function until the 20th century. In 1968 the third king, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, converted it into the National Museum of Bhutan, which it remains today.

Rivalry with the Trongsa Penlop

From the late 18th century onwards the central question of Bhutanese politics was the balance between the two great penlopships. The Druk Desi at Punakha was by then a rotating and largely ceremonial figure, installed and removed by whichever combination of penlops and dzongpens commanded the most armed retainers at the moment. In this environment the Paro and Trongsa governorships became, in effect, the two power centres of the country, and their alignments shaped every succession crisis.

The Paro faction tended to align with the western monastic establishment at Punakha and Thimphu and with the dzongpens of Wangdue Phodrang. It controlled the valleys nearest the capital, the Tibet trade and — until 1865 — the southern duars; politically it was identified with continuity, with Lhasa, and after the British advance into Sikkim in the 1860s with a posture suspicious of British India. The Trongsa faction, based at the eastern end of the only practicable east–west road, drew its strength from the manpower of the eastern districts and from the ability to physically sever the country in two. From the middle of the 19th century, under Jigme Namgyal (Trongsa Penlop 1853–1870 and again later as Druk Desi), it adopted a more accommodating posture towards the British government in India.

Open civil war between the two centres was chronic. Paro forces and Trongsa forces, often joined or opposed by the dzongpens of Punakha, Thimphu and Wangdue, fought a string of campaigns through the 1830s, 1850s and 1860s in which the office of Druk Desi changed hands repeatedly. Ashley Eden, who led the disastrous British mission to Bhutan in 1863–64, reported that there was effectively no central government in the country and that real authority lay with the two penlops.

The civil wars of 1864–1885

The defeat of Bhutan in the Duar War of 1864–65 and the resulting loss of the southern duars sharpened the rivalry rather than ending it. The annual British subsidy paid in compensation for the duars — fifty thousand rupees rising to one hundred thousand — became one more prize to be fought over, and Punakha repeatedly changed hands between Trongsa and Paro factions in the 1860s and 1870s.

In 1872 Jigme Namgyal, by then the dominant figure in the country, sent his teenage son Ugyen Wangchuck west to suppress a revolt led by the then Paro Penlop, Tshewang Norbu, in alliance with the dzongpen of Punakha, Ngodrub. The revolt was put down and Rinpung Dzong was taken. By 1878 Jigme Namgyal had appointed Ugyen Wangchuck himself as the Paro Penlop — the office is conventionally numbered the twenty-first Paro Penlop in his case — while keeping the Trongsa Penlopship in his own hands.

After Jigme Namgyal's death in 1881 the western faction at Punakha and Thimphu reorganised against the Trongsa interest. Between 1882 and 1885 the country fell into open civil war for the last time. In 1882 Ugyen Wangchuck marched east, recovered control of Bumthang and Trongsa, and combined the two penlopships in his own person. In 1884 and 1885 the dzongpens of Punakha and Thimphu, allied with the remaining Paro faction, rose against him. The decisive engagement was fought in 1885 at Changlimithang, on the meadow below Thimphu where the national stadium now stands. Ugyen Wangchuck's eastern levies defeated the western alliance, and in the aftermath he occupied Simtokha Dzong and dictated terms.

The defeat at Changlimithang ended the Paro Penlopship as an independent power. From 1885 onwards the office was filled by men loyal to, and increasingly related to, the Trongsa house. Western Bhutan continued to be administered from Rinpung Dzong, but its penlop now took his orders from the man at Trongsa.

Absorption into the monarchy

When Ugyen Wangchuck was elected the first hereditary Druk Gyalpo at Punakha on 17 December 1907, the dual system was formally dissolved and the regional penlopships became subordinate appointments of the Crown. The Trongsa Penlopship was retained as the title of the heir apparent. The Paro Penlopship was preserved as a distinct office but its political weight collapsed.

Under the first three kings the post was held by close relatives of the royal house. The first king's paternal cousin Dawa Penjor was appointed Paro Penlop in the early 20th century; on his death the office passed to Tshering Penjor, an uncle of the second king. From the 1920s onward the ceremonial dignity of the office was emphasised at the expense of any independent role, and the administration of Haa was detached: in 1895 Ugyen Wangchuck had appointed Kazi Ugyen Dorji as the first Haa Drungpa, removing the high western valley from Paro's jurisdiction and creating the basis for the later prominence of the Dorji family.

In the mid-20th century the title was given to members of the immediate royal family. Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, the future third king, served as Paro Penlop in the years before his accession in 1952; his half-brother Namgyel Wangchuck was appointed to the office afterwards. With the introduction of the modern dzongkhag administration in the 1960s and 1970s, executive authority over Paro passed to a salaried dzongdag answerable to the cabinet, and the Paro Penlopship lapsed into a purely honorific designation. It is not currently held.

Legacy

The Paro Penlop is remembered in Bhutanese tradition as the great rival of the Trongsa house and as the institution whose defeat in the 1880s made the Wangchuck monarchy possible. Its physical legacy is the western half of the country's pre-modern administrative geography: Rinpung Dzong as the seat of Paro Dzongkhag, the Ta Dzong as the National Museum, the trade routes through Haa and over the Tremo La, and the network of monastic estates around Paro that the office endowed and protected. Its political legacy is more ambiguous. The historiography produced under the monarchy after 1907 understandably presented the rivalry as a contest between an enlightened, unifying east and a fractious, Tibet-leaning west; later academic work, notably by John Ardussi and Karma Phuntsho, has stressed that for most of the dual-system era the Paro Penlop was the wealthier and arguably the more stable of the two offices, and that the eventual Trongsa victory owed as much to the personal capacities of Jigme Namgyal and Ugyen Wangchuck as to any structural advantage.

Historiography and sources

Documentary evidence on the Paro Penlopship is uneven. The best modern treatment in English is Karma Phuntsho's The History of Bhutan (2013), which devotes substantial space to the dual system and to the 19th-century civil wars and draws on Dzongkha-language chronicles unavailable to earlier writers. Michael Aris's Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (1979) remains the standard study of the 17th-century origins of the office. John Ardussi's papers on the Drukpa state and on the penlop system, published from the 1970s onward, are the principal English-language analyses of how the office actually functioned. Sonam Kinga's work on regional governance and on the transition to centralised administration after 1907 covers the late and post-monarchical period.

Numbered lists of Paro Penlops circulating in popular sources should be treated with caution. The chronicles disagree on the early holders, several of the names attached to the office in the 18th century cannot be securely dated, and the conventional list of twenty-six holders rests on a 20th-century reconstruction rather than on a continuous administrative record. Specific dates given here for the 19th-century holders follow Karma Phuntsho and the Wikipedia Penlop article in its current form; readers seeking a definitive genealogy should consult Phuntsho directly.

See also

• Trongsa Penlop
• Paro Rinpung Dzong
• National Museum of Bhutan (Ta Dzong)
• Battle of Changlimithang
• Ugyen Wangchuck
• Jigme Namgyal
• Duar War
• Wangchuck Dynasty
• Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal
• Druk Desi

References

1. Penlop — Wikipedia (overview of the office, list of Paro Penlops, and the relationship with the Trongsa Penlop)
2. Rinpung Dzong — Wikipedia (consecration in 1646, construction of the utse in 1649 under the first Paro Penlop, and the dzong's role as administrative and monastic centre of western Bhutan)
3. Ugyen Wangchuck — Wikipedia (appointment as Paro Penlop in 1878, suppression of Tshewang Norbu, and the 1882–1885 civil wars)
4. Penlop of Trongsa — Wikipedia (the Trongsa office and its relationship with Paro)
5. National Museum of Bhutan — Official Site (history of the Ta Dzong above Rinpung as a Paro Penlop watchtower and its conversion into the museum in 1968)
6. Wangchuck Dynasty — Wikipedia (post-1907 absorption of the regional penlopships into the monarchy)
7. Military History of Bhutan — Wikipedia (the 1882–1885 civil wars and the Battle of Changlimithang)
8. Karma Phuntsho, The History of Bhutan (Random House India, 2013) — the standard modern history, used here as the principal control on dates and on the structure of the dual system.
9. Michael Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (Aris and Phillips, 1979) — for the 17th-century origins of the penlop system.
10. John Ardussi, "Formation of the State of Bhutan (’Brug gzhung) in the 17th Century and its Tibetan Antecedents," Journal of Bhutan Studies, vol. 11 (2004) — for the analytic framework of the dual system and the regional governorships.