A stupa that binds two peoples together.

The Festival

Two days, one circumambulation.

Two hours' drive north of Trashigang, at the confluence of the Dangmechu and Kholungchu rivers, stands the white dome of Chorten Kora — one of the largest stupas in Bhutan and the only one modelled on Nepal's Boudhanath. Every year, on the 15th and 30th day of the first Bhutanese lunar month (usually late February and mid-March), the stupa becomes the centre of a two-part festival that has been observed here since the mid-eighteenth century.

The first day — the Dakpa Kora — belongs to the Dakpa people of Tawang, in what is now Arunachal Pradesh in India. Fifteen days later, the Drukpa Kora gathers Bhutanese pilgrims from across the country. It is the same monument, the same slow walk around it, and — at heart — the same story, told twice, by two peoples on either side of a mountain border.

The story behind the stupa

Chorten Kora was built in 1740 by Lama Ngawang Loday, who is said to have received instructions in a vision to raise a stupa on the site to subdue a demon that had troubled the valley. He travelled to Nepal, studied Boudhanath, and carved a wooden model of it to bring back — from which the Trashiyangtse stupa was raised. Boudhanath's proportions are still visible if you know what to look for.

The legend has a second, sadder chapter. According to Dakpa oral tradition, an eight-year-old girl from Tawang named Ashi Nima, of Dakpa lineage, was interred alive inside the stupa during its consecration — a sacrificial act she is said to have accepted willingly. The Dakpa Kora, each year, is a pilgrimage in her memory. Whether the story is history, myth, or something older than both is a question local storytellers won't answer definitively. What matters is that it is remembered — and that the Dakpa people, from a valley now in another country, still make the crossing every year to walk around a stupa that holds one of their own.

What you'll see

On a festival morning, the stupa is ringed by circumambulators from before dawn — pilgrims in their finest kira, gho, and Dakpa dress; prayer beads clicking; smoke from butter lamps rising into cold air. The pace is slow, quiet, prayerful. Between kora rounds, families settle on the surrounding grass with thermoses of tea. Traders set up stalls along the approach — cloth, incense, dried yak cheese, bamboo whistles. There is sometimes traditional song and dance, and always the low, continuous sound of mantras.

The setting is what makes it feel like nowhere else in Bhutan — remote, riverine, more sub-tropical than the west, with the stupa's white dome standing in a clearing above the water.

Practical notes

Why this festival matters

Chorten Kora is a rare thing: a Bhutanese religious site that draws Indian pilgrims, and a festival that puts a border-crossing story at its centre. For travellers who have already seen the western Bhutan circuit and want the country's eastern soul, this is the doorway. The east is quieter, greener, less-visited, and — as you'll feel the moment you arrive at the stupa — carries a different rhythm entirely.