Volunteers build Buddhist stupas in Bhutan's planned Mindfulness City

Volunteers are raising a procession of Buddhist stupas along the Mao Chhu River in Gelephu, where Buddhist masters have gathered and visitors pray and chant beside the unfinished shrines. Each stupa symbolizes the Buddha's enlightenment. All of them belong to a city that does not yet exist.

The stupas are the most visible pieces so far of the Gelephu Mindfulness City, envisioned by Bhutan's king as an engine for an economy with little to sell but its own image. The project is meant to boost growth while embracing Buddhist values, and it is to be built in phases over several decades — a schedule under which the costs are certain, front-loaded and domestic, while the revenues stay distant and hypothetical. A city built in phases must finance each stage on the promise of the next, and the customers a mindfulness economy attracts can, by definition, live anywhere. Bhutan's brand is the point: a kingdom that coined 'gross national happiness' now proposes to zone that happiness into a designated region before anyone else thinks of it. The name on the masterplan is not an ornament. It is the product.

What the site at Gelephu shows is devotion doing double duty as ground-breaking ceremony. Volunteers raise shrines that cost the project nothing in labour, while visitors chant at a construction site, the rites preceding the city the way a blessing precedes a tower. Whether an economy follows is a question decades away; what is already standing is free work and a riverbank consecrated into an asset.

The site lies on the southern plains near the Indian border, far from the Himalayan glaciers that have just reminded the region how provisional its landscape is — a glacial lake burst in northern Bhutan this month and sent flood alerts across West Bengal and Assam. The kingdom is pouring its future into the south while its geography reorganizes itself in the north.

The stupas went up with volunteer labour. The city around them will not.