Project 108 in One Day: Between One Sunrise and the Next

Every great monument in history has been carried by someone for years.

The Great Pyramid took about twenty-six years, and crews rotated through it for a quarter of a century. The Taj Mahal took some twenty thousand workers about twenty years. The Great Wall of China took more than two thousand years; generations of families were born beside it, worked on it and died on it, and never saw it finished. The Sagrada Família in Barcelona was begun in 1882 and is still not complete. How those compare is its own story.

Project 108 will take one day. On 1 November 2026, 108 Jangchub Chortens, each about fifteen metres tall, are to rise along the Mau Chhu in Gelephu between one sunrise and the next.

It could have been done over a year. The choice of a single day, and of volunteers, is where the project’s meaning lies — as His Majesty’s own words, quoted below, make clear.

Everyone, at once

A monument built over decades is built by whoever happens to be available. A monument built in a day can only be built if everyone comes at the same time.

Close to 40,000 people are needed on the riverbank — about one in twenty of Bhutan’s residents — with 300 to each chorten, and by 28 September 68,914 had registered to attend. Monks and farmers, students and retirees, civil servants and Bhutanese flown home from abroad will stand in one place, on one morning, for one purpose. No monument of the Pyramid’s kind could ever do that: its builders were spread across twenty-six years, and none of them saw all the others. On 1 November, everyone will see everyone.

No one carries it for years

The terrible thing about the great wall-building eras was not the effort of any one day. It was that the work never ended, and it fell on the same families generation after generation.

A single day inverts that. The load is spread so widely, across so many hands, that it becomes light. No one gives up years of their life. No child grows up watching a parent disappear into it. A family gives a day, together, and goes home in the evening to a finished chorten.

The day is the offering

The date was chosen with care. In 2026, 1 November is Lhabab Duechen — the Descending Day of Lord Buddha, one of the great holy days of the Buddhist year, marking his return to earth after teaching in the heaven of the thirty-three gods. In the Buddhist tradition, virtuous actions on such days are held to carry merit many times over. It is also Coronation Day.

For the days leading up to it, His Holiness the Je Khenpo will be in Gelephu, leading the prayers and rituals of purification and blessing that prepare the ground. The labour of 1 November is then offered as one act: not 108 separate construction jobs, but a single collective offering, made on a single sacred day.

An old story, told again

There is a precedent in Himalayan tradition. In the seventh century, the story goes, the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo raised 108 temples across the Himalaya — all on the same day — to pin down a demoness lying across the land. Two of them stand in Bhutan: Kyichu Lhakhang in Paro and Jambay Lhakhang in Bumthang. Project 108 takes that legend of 108 sacred structures raised in a day and does it in the open, with the whole country watching. Why the number matters is told in The Number 108

The day is only the visible part

One day of building does not mean one day of work. The corridor was walked in March. The ground was blessed at all 108 sites in June. Some forty masters spent more than four months at Sarpang preparing the sacred relics that will give each chorten its heart, and at the end of September forty-three meditation masters began a twenty-one-day consecration of them. Volunteer programmes have cleared the land in turns all year. Almost all of the funding was secured by the end of June.

This is how a barn raising works in the old farming communities: weeks of careful preparation, then everyone arrives at once and the barn goes up before dark. The single day is the moment the preparation becomes visible — and it only works because the preparation was done.

A memory for a generation

Most people never remember the day a monument was built, because there was no such day. There were years of days, and nobody was there for all of them.

Project 108 will have a date. Tens of thousands of Bhutanese will be able to say, for the rest of their lives, I was there on the first of November. Children who carried water will show their own children which chorten their family helped raise. That shared memory is itself part of what is being built.

His Majesty The King set out the idea behind it at the start: “there is no limit to what we can achieve when we stand together.” A single day is the most demanding way to test that — and the most visible way to show it.

On 1 November, the line of chortens is to rise between one sunrise and the next. Who is coming is told in Project 108 Masters and Project 108 and Zhabtog; the plan itself is in Project 108: The Plan and the Vision.