Project 108: The Plan and the Vision for 108 Chortens in a Day

On Sunday 1 November 2026, along a stretch of the Mau Chhu in Gelephu, 108 Jangchub Chortens are to rise together. Each will stand about fifteen metres tall — roughly five storeys. Each will sit 108 metres from the next. And all of them are to be raised in a single day, by volunteers, with close to 40,000 people expected on the sites.

Kuensel has called it an undertaking without precedent in the country’s history. That is easy to believe. Bhutan has built chortens for as long as it has been Bhutan, and it has built large ones. It has not built 108 of them, fifteen metres high, between one sunrise and the next.

This is what is known, from the public record, about how it is being done.

The announcement

Project 108 was announced on 21 February 2026, His Majesty The King’s birth anniversary, at the opening of the fifth volunteer programme in Gelephu Mindfulness City. More than 16,000 registered volunteers had come to Gelephu for five days of work — the largest public mobilisation the city had seen. The same day, ground was broken for the Gelephu Chorten, an 80-metre stupa modelled on Boudhanath in Kathmandu.

The instruction for the 108 was specific. All of them were to be completed in a single day, with 300 workers assigned to each. A month later, on 24 March, His Majesty walked the corridor chosen for them.

The corridor

The chortens will stand in one line along the river. At 108 metres apart, 108 chortens span 107 intervals — about 11.6 kilometres from the first to the last. Published descriptions put the line at eleven to twelve kilometres.

The line has three fixed points. On 16 June 2026 the Central Monastic Body performed the Salang Tendrel — the ground-breaking ceremony — simultaneously at three points along the corridor: at Chorten 1 near Serzhong Bridge, at Chorten 92 at the Chuzergang viewpoint, and at Chorten 108. All 108 sites were blessed that day.

What goes inside

A chorten’s outer form is the part everyone sees. The part the tradition treats as more important is sealed inside: the zung, the sacred inner substance of relics, consecrated texts and prepared objects around a central wooden pole, the sokshing.

The Central Monastic Body is responsible for it. Zung preparation for all 108 chortens began at Sarpang Dzong the afternoon of the ground-breaking, with zung lopons drawn from all twenty dzongkhags; some forty masters of the practice worked there for several months since June, and at the end of September forty-three masters from Bhutan’s meditation centres began a twenty-one-day consecration of the relics. In July His Holiness the Je Khenpo offered 120 sacred Ringsel to be enshrined in the chortens. The work, and what it asks of the monks doing it, is described in The Zung Inside Every Chorten.

How it is being paid for

The cost of raising one chorten is USD 200,000, which puts the full line at about USD 21.6 million. When the public contribution window opened in May, there were four routes to it:

The response came quickly. By 23 May more than fifty chortens had sponsors. By mid-June about eighty had been individually sponsored outside the crowdfunding route. By 27 June Kuensel reported that almost all of them had secured funding — and that on the exchange’s crowdfunding platform alone, 3,062 donors had contributed Nu 13.65 million, alongside 257 international contributors giving more than USD 35,000. When the crowdfunding closed on 21 August, the Royal Securities Exchange handed over offerings from 7,866 people: Nu 28.37 million and USD 84,651, from Bhutanese at home and abroad and from supporters overseas.

Daily Bhutan’s accounting in mid-June put the total at nearly Nu 850 million raised within Bhutan and USD 8.5 million from abroad — enough for about 88 chortens at that point. The domestic contribution drive closed on 21 August; offerings from abroad remain open.

The list of sponsors is its own portrait of the country: the Royal Family, monastic institutions, the armed forces, civil servants, businesses, a foresters’ welfare fund built up over generations, a group of former ministers and senior officials, Bhutanese living abroad, and supporters in Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.

One detail connects it to the rest of this site’s October reporting. The crowdfunding ran on the same online platform of the Royal Securities Exchange that sold the Gelephu Nation Building Bond in 2025, when 35,403 people bought into the city’s airport. In two years that platform has become the way Bhutanese households put money into Gelephu — once as investors, once as devotees.

Who is building it

The chortens will be raised through zhabtog — Bhutan’s tradition of voluntary service offered for the common good, undertaken with spiritual intention. Gelephu has been running on it all year. Each of the city’s volunteer programmes has cleared and restored land in turns: more than 16,000 people in February, a five-day programme in April that included about 160 Bhutanese who flew home from Australia to take part, and about 3,000 more in late August, some of them working on the 108 site itself. What zhabtog means, and why the voluntary spirit of the day matters, is the subject of Project 108 and Zhabtog.

For the day itself, close to 40,000 volunteers are needed on the structures and around them. Interest has run far ahead of that: more than 30,000 had signed up by late June, and by the evening of 28 September, BBS reported, 68,914 people — Bhutanese and visitors from abroad — had registered to attend the raising, 38,173 men and 30,741 women. Registration for Bhutanese nationals has since been extended to 15 October. The arithmetic of the instruction explains the scale: 108 chortens at 300 workers each is 32,400 people on the structures alone, before the kitchens, the transport and everything that supports them.

Forty thousand people is about one in twenty of Bhutan’s residents. Kuensel’s description of who is coming reads like a census: monks and farmers, students and retirees, professionals, and members of the diaspora.

Why 1 November

The date carries two meanings at once. In 2026, 1 November is Lhabab Duechen — the Descending Day of Lord Buddha, marking his return from the heaven where he had taught his mother. It is also Coronation Day, the national holiday that marks His Majesty’s coronation. Why the whole line is raised on that single day, rather than over a year, is the subject of Project 108 in One Day.

Why 108

The number needs little introduction in Bhutan. It is the count of beads on a prayer mala; it runs through Buddhist and Hindu tradition alike; and it has been built into the landscape before. In the seventh century Songtsen Gampo is said to have raised 108 temples across the Himalayas. In 2004 Bhutan raised 108 chortens on the Dochula pass. Why the number carries the weight it does — from the mala to the mathematics — is the subject of The Number 108; how Gelephu’s line relates to Dochula’s is Dochula, Gelephu and a Seventh-Century King.

The vision

The plan answers how. The vision answers why, and it has been stated in public in three ways.

A line of prayer. The chortens are not arranged as a monument to be looked at from one spot. They are a line — a procession of prayer strung along the river, which Daily Bhutan described in May as a line of prayer across the land and Kuensel in September as a line of prayer for a more harmonious humanity. A Jangchub Chorten commemorates the Buddha’s enlightenment; 108 of them in a row, sealed with relics, are meant to bless the ground they stand on and everyone who passes.

A spiritual foundation for a new city. Gelephu Mindfulness City is being built as a place where economic life and mindfulness go together. Among its earliest landmarks will be not an office tower or a factory but a line of chortens and, rising beside them, the 80-metre Gelephu Chorten. A city meant to be defined by mindfulness is laying down its sacred geography early.

What a people can do together. The instruction that all 108 be raised on one day is the part that turns a building programme into a statement. It could be done more easily over a year. Doing it in one day requires tens of thousands of people to come on the same morning, to the same place, for the same purpose — freely. That is the point of the single day, and His Majesty’s words on it close this piece. What that asks of the people who come is the subject of Project 108 and Zhabtog; how rare it has become, anywhere, is the subject of Great Monuments Today.

His Holiness the Je Khenpo will lead the prayers of purification and blessing in Gelephu from 21 October, and masters from across the Buddhist world, who have offered chortens and relics, will be in Gelephu for the prayers and consecration from 1 to 4 November; who they are is set out in Project 108 Masters.

From announcement to the day

Most large projects are measured in years and judged by whether they finish. This one is measured in a single day, and the thing it sets out to demonstrate is stated plainly in His Majesty’s own words: that “there is no limit to what we can achieve when we stand together.”

On 1 November, the line of chortens is to rise along the Mau Chhu.