Project 108 by the Numbers: How Big Is 108 Chortens in a Day?

A single fifteen-metre chorten is not, by itself, a large building. Bhutan has many. What makes Project 108 unusual is not the size of any one structure but what happens when you multiply it — by 108, by tens of thousands of people, and then divide it all into one day.

The numbers, on their own

Some of those numbers become clearer set side by side with something familiar.

• Height. Stack the 108 chortens on top of one another and they would reach about 1,620 metres — nearly twice the height of the Burj Khalifa.
• Length. The line is almost three times the length of New York’s Central Park.
• Money. USD 21.6 million across Bhutan’s population of under 800,000 is about USD 27 for every person in the country — raised largely through sponsorship and offerings, from Bhutan and abroad.

The people: one in twenty

Bhutan’s population is under 800,000. Forty thousand people is about five per cent of it — about one in twenty of the people who live in Bhutan, in one place, on one day.

The same share of other countries would be:

Few countries could even ask a twentieth of their people to build something together on a single day. At Bhutan’s scale, it is possible to ask. The answer is what makes it real. By 28 September, 68,914 people had registered to attend — a number equal to nearly nine per cent of Bhutan’s population, though it includes visitors from abroad.

The time: one day against the centuries

The comparison that most sets Project 108 apart is time. The great sacred monuments of the world were built across generations.

• The Great Pyramid of Giza took about 26 years, around 2600 BCE, with a workforce estimated to have peaked near 40,000 — the same number Project 108 expects for a single day.
• The Taj Mahal took some 20,000 artisans and labourers, from 1632 until the complex was finished in 1653.
• Tōdai-ji’s Great Buddha in Nara took nine years, 743 to 752. The temple’s records say more than 2.6 million people contributed rice, timber, metal, cloth or labour — the closest historical parallel to a sacred building raised by a whole population’s offerings.
• Angkor Wat took about 28 years; Borobudur, built in stages, about half a century.
• Dochula’s 108 chortens, Bhutan’s own precedent, rose in about six months in 2004.

The Great Pyramid: twenty-six years of toil

The Great Pyramid of Giza, built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BCE, is the benchmark every monument is measured against. It took about 26 years. It is made of some 2.3 million blocks — about six million tonnes of stone — and it rose to 146.6 metres, which made it the tallest structure built by human hands for more than 3,700 years.

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing two thousand years later, claimed it took gangs of 100,000 men, working in three-month shifts, twenty years. Modern estimates are smaller: one construction study put the average workforce at about 13,200, peaking near 40,000 — almost exactly the number expected on the Mau Chhu on 1 November.

What that work meant in human terms is recorded in the oldest inscribed papyri ever found. The Diary of Merer, discovered in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea, is the logbook of an inspector who, in the 26th year of Khufu’s reign, commanded some forty boatmen hauling limestone from the quarries at Tura to Giza: about thirty blocks of two to three tonnes every ten days, month after month. Multiply that crew by the length of the project and the scale of the toil comes into view.

The popular image of slaves under the whip is not what archaeology shows. Excavations of the workers’ town at Giza found bakeries, breweries and kitchens — bread, beef and fish were staples — along with a hospital, and the workers were buried in tombs beside the pyramids with bread and beer for the afterlife. They were organised, fed and cared for. But they were also labour owed to a king, working in rotating crews for a quarter of a century on a monument that bore his name, not theirs.

Project 108 asks the same number of people for one day, and asks nothing of them but that they come.

The Great Wall: two thousand years of conscripts

If the Pyramid is the measure of one reign’s labour, the Great Wall of China is the measure of an empire’s. It was not built once. The earliest walls date to the seventh century BCE; the stretches most visitors walk today are Ming, built and rebuilt between 1368 and 1644. From first to last, the building went on for more than two thousand years, and a 2012 survey put the length of what survives at about 21,000 kilometres.

Its most famous phase came in about 221 BCE, when Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, sent his general Meng Tian north with an army of 300,000 to drive back the Xiongnu and join the older walls into one. Soldiers, convicts and conscripted peasants did the work. Estimates of how many died building the wall across its history run as high as 400,000; the story that their bodies were sealed inside it is legend.

Chinese memory kept the cost in a folktale. In the story of Meng Jiangnü, one of China’s Four Great Folktales, a young wife’s husband is conscripted to build the wall and dies there; when she learns of it, her weeping is so great that a section of the wall collapses, revealing his bones.

Numbers on that scale stop meaning anything. So imagine, instead, being born beside the wall.

You are a child in a village in the north. Every morning you watch your grandfather leave for the wall. Your father goes with him. Some years later your elder brother goes too, and one day it is your turn. The wall was there before your grandfather was born, and it will still be unfinished when you die. Your parents die building it. You know that you will die building it. No one tells you this is unusual, because no one you have ever known has lived any other way. You probably think this is simply what life is.

Now imagine a child in Gelephu on the morning of 1 November 2026.

She watches her grandfather set out for the river before dawn. Her father goes with him, and her elder brother, and this year she is old enough to carry water. They work beside monks and farmers, civil servants and strangers who have flown in from Perth. By evening a chorten stands where there was bare ground in the morning, and they walk home together. No one ordered them to go. No one will ask them to go back tomorrow. For the rest of her life, whenever she passes that line of chortens along the Mau Chhu, she will know that one of them rose partly under her family’s hands.

The wall was raised by those who could not refuse. The 108 chortens will be raised in a day by those who asked to come. Why that single day is the whole point is told in Project 108 in One Day.

The Taj Mahal, and the legend of the hands

No monument shows the contrast more sharply than the Taj Mahal. Shah Jahan’s tomb for his wife took some 20,000 workers about twenty years. And it carries one of the most repeated stories in the history of building: that when the work was done, the emperor had the builders’ hands cut off, so that nothing so beautiful could ever be made again.

The story is almost certainly a legend. No contemporary record supports it, and the architect credited with the Taj, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, went on to lay out the Red Fort at Delhi. But the legend has lasted for centuries because it captures something true about how the great monuments of the past were made: they belonged to the one who commanded them, not to the hands that built them.

Project 108 inverts every part of that story. Twice the Taj’s workforce, for one day instead of twenty years; no one commanded, no one paid; and the merit of the work is held to belong to every pair of hands that raises it.

Daily Bhutan made the pyramid comparison itself in May: forty thousand volunteers in a day, against a pyramid workforce over decades.

What has been built in a day

One-day building is not unknown — at the scale of a family or a village. In Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, a barn raising still puts up a barn in a day or two, after weeks of preparation, with every able-bodied member of the community expected to come. Habitat for Humanity teams have raced to build a house in under four hours.

Project 108 takes that idea — careful preparation, then everyone at once — and applies it at the scale of a nation. The preparation has taken most of 2026: the corridor walked in March, the ground blessed at all 108 sites in June, the relics prepared at Sarpang Dzong through the summer, the volunteer programmes clearing the land in turns. The day itself is the barn raising.

What the scale is really measuring

A pyramid measures what a state could command. A cathedral measures what a city could sustain over generations. Project 108 measures something else: how many people will come, freely, on the same morning, for the same purpose.

That is the part that cannot be bought or ordered, and the subject of Project 108 and Zhabtog: 40,000 People, One Purpose. The plan itself is set out in Project 108: The Plan and the Vision.