Contributors who trace ancestry here
No public contributor has set their ancestry to Samtenling yet. Anonymous origin records and unmatched village names are not shown here. Trace your own ancestry to be the first.
Oral histories from Samtenling
No public oral history names Samtenling as the narrator's origin yet. Record your story and choose your consent tier.
Articles that mention Samtenling
Gelephu International Airport
Gelephu International Airport is Bhutan's planned second international airport, under construction at Gelephu in the south of the country as the gateway to the Gelephu Mindfulness City. Designed by the Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group with a carved mass-timber terminal, it is scheduled to open in 2029.
Sarpang District
Sarpang District (Dzongkha: སར་པང་རྫོང་ཁག) is one of the twenty dzongkhags of Bhutan, situated in the south-central part of the country along the Indian border. Known for its subtropical climate and lowland geography, Sarpang serves as a significant agricultural region and a gateway between highland Bhutan and the Indian plains.
Criticism of Gelephu Mindfulness City
Gelephu Mindfulness City, a planned mega-city in southern Bhutan announced in 2023, has drawn criticism on multiple fronts including its construction on land from which Lhotshampa were expelled in the 1990s, environmental risks to ecologically sensitive areas, economic feasibility concerns given Bhutan's small economy and existing debt, governance questions about its SAR status, and comparisons to other failed mega-city projects in Asia.
Renaming of Places in Southern Bhutan
Between the 1950s and late 1990s, the Royal Government of Bhutan systematically renamed districts, towns, gewogs, and villages across southern Bhutan from their historical Nepali-origin names to Dzongkha names. Human rights organizations and refugee communities have characterized the renaming as part of a broader pattern of cultural erasure targeting the Lhotshampa population, while the Bhutanese government has framed parts of the process as linguistic standardization.
Gelephu and the Lhotshampa Connection
Gelephu, the site of Bhutan's planned Mindfulness City, was historically known as "Hatisar" (elephant place in Nepali) and was a major centre of Lhotshampa settlement before the 1990s expulsions. This article examines the town's multicultural history, the forced displacement of its Lhotshampa residents, land confiscation, the current status of property claims, and the moral and legal questions raised by developing a mega-city on land from which an ethnic community was expelled.
Connected to Samtenling?
Trace your ancestry on the family-origins map, or share an oral history under any of the four consent tiers.