Sources for the History of Bhutan

The four works included in this collection have enjoyed a rather chequered career. They originally formed the second volume of the doctoral thesis Michael Aris submitted in 1978 to the University of London. They have been included because of their value as crucial source material on the formative era of Bhutanese history, as they cover the entire period leading to the full emergence of the Bhutanese theocracy. Their relative brevity as compared with the other major works relevant to this period further suggested the convenience of including them as a group of inter-related ‘minor’ texts.

While the first two works in this collection have never before been available to modern scholars, and are indeed hardly known even in Bhutan, the next two (which include a text translated from Portuguese) have been partially known from the works of John Claude white (Sikkim and Bhutan- Twenty-one years on the North- East frontier 1887-1908, London) and C. Wessels (Early Jesuit Travellers in central Asia, The Hague 1924).

Michael Aris (1946-1999) was research fellow in Tibetan and Himalayan studies at St. Antony’s college, Oxford. He was also visiting professor at Harvard University and a fellow of the Indian Institute of advanced studies. In 1967-72 he lived in Bhutan and worked there as a royal tutor, government translator and historical researcher. On returning to England he obtained a doctorate in Tibetan literature form London University. Michael Aris was married to Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel peace Prize.

John A. Ardussi is a senior research fellow in the Dept. of religious studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and associate research member of the Tibet Himalayan study team, UMR-8155 of CNRS (Paris).

He was awarded a post-graduate fellowship and earned his doctorate in 1977 from Australian national University, Canberra, with a dissertation on the history of Bhutan.

He has traveled to Bhutan many times for research and lectures and written numerous articles on Bhutan and Tibetan history, including most recently the edited proceedings of the conference "The written treasures of Bhutan" hosted by the Bhutan national library.