Paro Rinpung Dzong: Fortress Monastery and Art in Bhutan’s Paro Valley

Anyone who flies into Paro, or out of it, sees Paro Rinpung Dzong from the aircraft window. The runway follows the valley floor, and the fortress stands on the slope above the river, a whitewashed mass so large it reads more like a walled town than a single building. Up close it turns out to be something close to both: a working monastery for the district’s monks and the seat of Paro’s civil government, sharing one set of walls as they have since the seventeenth century. On Odyssey Traveller’s small group tours of Bhutan, it is where the Paro Valley is explained, together with the National Museum in the old round watchtower on the hill above.

The Paro Valley as a heritage landscape

Paro sits at about 2,200 metres in a broad, flat-bottomed valley cut by the Paro Chhu. Rice terraces and wheat fields run across the floor, and the slopes above are dark with blue pine. Scattered through the fields are the big three-storey farmhouses of western Bhutan, their lower walls of rammed earth and their upper floors of painted timber, many of them still working farms. It is a gentle-looking place, and it is easy to forget that for most of its history it was a frontier.

The valley opens north toward Tibet, and the trade and pilgrim routes that crossed the high passes toward Phari came down into Bhutan here. That explains the density of fortification. At the head of the valley stands Drukgyel Dzong, the ruined Fortress of Victory that guarded the northern approach. In the middle, commanding the river crossing, is Rinpung Dzong. On the hill directly above it is the Ta Dzong, the watchtower built to protect it. Read in sequence, these three buildings describe a defensive system, and the valley makes far more sense once you see them that way.

Religion is layered in just as deeply. Kyichu Lhakhang, a little north of the town, is counted among the oldest temples in Bhutan, traditionally founded in the seventh century, and Taktsang, the Tiger’s Nest, clings to the cliffs further up the valley. For travellers arriving overland, Paro is the last stop of the 14-day Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan itinerary, and the place where the whole Bhutan leg comes into focus.

Rinpung Dzong: fortress and monastery

The site was sacred long before it was fortified. Tradition holds that Guru Rinpoche gave the rock face its name in the eighth century, and in the fifteenth century the local community offered the crag of Hungrel to Lama Drung Drung Gyal, a descendant of Phajo Drugom Zhigpo, who brought the Drukpa Kagyu teaching to western Bhutan. He built a small temple there and later a five-storey fortress, Hungrel Dzong.

Two centuries later his descendants, the Lords of Hungrel, offered that fortress to Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the Tibetan lama who was then drawing the valleys of western Bhutan into a single state. In 1644 the Zhabdrung had the old building taken down and laid the foundations of a much larger one, consecrated in 1646. He named it Rinpung, the “heap of jewels”, and made it the administrative and monastic centre of western Bhutan. It was built in the decade when Tibetan armies were repeatedly pushing south into these valleys, and the thick, sloping walls and single guarded entrance were not ornamental.

The building standing today is not quite the Zhabdrung’s. It survived the great earthquake of 1897, but in 1907 fire swept through it and most of its statues and relics were lost. One treasure came through: the enormous thongdrel, the appliqué banner of Guru Rinpoche that is still unrolled at the annual festival. The dzong was rebuilt on its old plan by the Paro governor, Dawa Penjor, which is why it still reads as a coherent seventeenth-century fortress.

One building, two institutions

What makes Rinpung Dzong worth time, rather than a photograph from the bridge, is that it still does what it was built to do. Bhutan’s dzongs embody the old dual system of government, religious and civil authority sharing one roof. Here the district administration of Paro works in one part of the building and the district’s monastic body lives, studies and performs its rituals in another, the two areas arranged around separate courtyards and divided by the tall central tower, the utse. On a weekday morning you are as likely to pass a clerk in a gho carrying files as a young monk carrying butter lamps.

Inside are fourteen shrines and chapels, among them a temple to the Eight Manifestations of Guru Rinpoche and a chapel of the Eleven-faced Avalokiteshvara. Which ones are open to visitors on a given day depends on the monastic calendar, and your local guide will know. The galleries around the courtyards are painted with Buddhist cosmology and protective deities, and the carved and painted timber of the windows and brackets is some of the finest in the country. Film enthusiasts may recognise the courtyards, too: several scenes in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1993 film Little Buddha were shot here.

How much walking does a visit to Paro Rinpung Dzong involve?

Expect a short but steep climb and plenty of steps. The approach from the covered bridge rises on a stone-paved path to the dzong’s gate, and inside, the levels are linked by steep timber stairs and doorways with high raised sills that need stepping over with care. It sits comfortably within the Level 2 – Moderate grading of both tours, which assumes three to five hours of activity a day and walking of up to eight kilometres on uneven ground.

Ta Dzong and the National Museum

On the ridge above Rinpung Dzong stands the building that was meant to keep it safe. The Ta Dzong, or watchtower, was begun in 1649 by Tenzin Drukdra, the first governor of Paro and a half-brother of the Zhabdrung, who later ruled the country as its second temporal head. Completed in 1651, it is unlike any other dzong: round rather than rectangular, with walls about two and a half metres thick, and a form often likened to a conch shell. From its terrace a watchman could see anyone approaching the valley long before they reached the river.

By the twentieth century it had lost its military purpose, and in 1968 the third king, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, had it restored and opened as the National Museum of Bhutan. The collection now runs to around three thousand works spanning some fifteen centuries: painted and appliqué thangkas, bronze statues, festival masks, arms and armour, jewellery, textiles, and a well-known collection of Bhutanese stamps. The building is part of the display. Climbing through its narrow floors gives a better feel for a seventeenth-century fortress than any diagram.

The Ta Dzong has also had a recent history of its own. The earthquake that struck the eastern Himalaya in September 2011 cracked the old walls badly enough that the building had to close. Restoration began in 2014 with support from the Government of India, and the museum reopened in its original home on 24 June 2020, with modern lighting and conservation-grade display cases fitted inside the historic shell. Some older guidebooks still describe the collection as being in a temporary building; that is no longer the case. An adjacent annex holds further displays, including festival masks and natural history.

How long should you allow for the National Museum in Paro?

An hour to ninety minutes covers the main galleries at an unhurried pace, with a little longer if you want the annex. Photography is not permitted inside, so keep the camera for the terrace, where the view down over Rinpung Dzong and along the valley is one of the best in Paro. The galleries are spread over several floors of the tower, linked by stairs.

Craft, textiles and woodturning in the Paro Valley

Bhutan recognises thirteen traditional arts, the zorig chusum, and a morning at Rinpung Dzong and the museum is effectively a survey of several of them at once. The murals and thangkas are the work of painters trained in strict iconographic proportion. The carved and painted window frames, brackets and doors belong to the carpenter’s and carver’s arts. The masks in the museum, and the festival costumes they are worn with, draw on sculptors, painters and embroiderers together. These are living trades, still taught formally and still in demand, because every new public building in Bhutan is expected to follow traditional design.

One craft is easiest to understand by watching it. On the Tour of Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Bhutan, the group may see a demonstration near the museum by local woodturners, who shape the lidded wooden bowls and cups that Bhutanese households have long used for rice and butter tea. Turning is one of the thirteen arts, and it prizes timber with dense, swirling grain, especially the burls of maple and other hardwoods. There is usually a chance to try the lathe yourself, which is a quick lesson in how much skill goes into a plain-looking bowl.

Textiles are the other great Bhutanese art, and weaving, the most highly regarded of the thirteen, is traditionally women’s work. Paro is not the best place to study it in depth. That honour belongs to Thimphu, and both tours visit the capital earlier in the journey, where the National Textile Museum sets out the patterns, dyes and regional styles in detail. In Paro, the textiles in the National Museum’s collection and the kira and gho worn by the people around you show the same tradition in everyday use.

What should you wear to visit Paro Rinpung Dzong?

Wear long sleeves and long trousers or a long skirt, with a shirt that has a collar. Dzongs are government offices as well as monasteries, and Bhutan asks visitors to dress as they would for a formal occasion: no shorts, sleeveless tops or hats inside the walls. Photography is generally welcome in the courtyards but not inside the shrines, and your guide will say where it is allowed. Bring a warm layer too, because mornings at this altitude can be cool in both April and November.

When is the Paro Tshechu held at Rinpung Dzong?

The Paro Tshechu runs for five days in the second month of the Bhutanese lunar calendar, which usually falls in March or April. Monks perform masked dances in the courtyard and on the festival ground just outside the walls, and before dawn on the final day the great thongdrel, the banner that survived the 1907 fire, is unrolled across a wall and taken down again before sunlight can touch it. Because the dates move with the lunar calendar, whether a particular spring departure overlaps the festival changes from year to year, and a Tour Specialist can check a given date for you. Our guide to the festivals of Bhutan explains how the tshechu calendar works across the country.

How Paro’s great sites fit together

It is tempting to treat Paro as a base for one climb. The hike to Taktsang, the Tiger’s Nest Monastery, is the most famous walk in Bhutan, a 900-metre ascent to a temple at 3,120 metres, and on the Darjeeling tour it comes the day before the dzong and museum visit. But the Tiger’s Nest shows only one side of Bhutanese Buddhism: the hermitage, the cave, the solitary meditator on a cliff. Rinpung Dzong shows the other side, religion woven into government and daily administration, which is arguably more distinctive of Bhutan as a country.

Seen together, the valley’s sites tell a connected story. Kyichu Lhakhang represents the earliest arrival of Buddhism. Rinpung Dzong and the Ta Dzong record the seventeenth-century state that the Zhabdrung built out of rival valleys. Drukgyel Dzong, visited the same afternoon on the Darjeeling tour, marks the frontier that state had to defend against Tibet. The museum holds the objects that make all of it tangible.

Rinpung Dzong also rewards comparison with the other great fortress on the route. Punakha Dzong, the Palace of Great Happiness, was built by the same Zhabdrung a few years earlier, in 1637, at the meeting of two rivers in the warm lowland valley that served as Bhutan’s winter capital. Punakha is grander and more serene, while Paro is more compact, more obviously defensive and more closely bound up with the town around it. Having seen one a few days before the other is one of the quiet advantages of travelling the whole route in order.

Paro is where most visitors first meet Bhutan, and for travellers arriving overland from India it is where the journey ends. Either way, a morning spent crossing the covered bridge, walking up into Rinpung Dzong and climbing through the rooms of the old watchtower is the clearest single lesson in how this small kingdom has held itself together for nearly four centuries. Both the Tour of Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Bhutan and the Bhutan Small Group Cultural Tour give it the unhurried time it deserves, in a small group with a Program Leader and local guides who can open the doors and explain what lies behind them.