Project 108 and Zhabtog: 40,000 People, One Purpose, One Day

Most great buildings are remembered by who ordered them and who designed them. The people who actually raised them are usually forgotten — and most of them, through most of history, had little choice about being there.

Project 108 is built the other way round. What matters about it is precisely who comes, and that every one of them chose to.

A word for work given freely

Bhutan has a word for it: zhabtog. It means service offered for the common good — voluntary, unpaid, and undertaken with a spiritual intention. It is labour given the way an offering is given. The effort itself is the gift, and the merit of the finished work is shared by everyone whose hands were in it.

A chorten raised this way is not only a monument. Every stone set by a volunteer is that volunteer’s offering. A line of 108 chortens raised by tens of thousands of people is, in that sense, tens of thousands of offerings joined together.

A year of practice

Gelephu has been running on zhabtog since 2025. His Majesty The King has led a series of volunteer programmes to prepare the ground for the Gelephu Mindfulness City, in successive rounds.

Kuensel’s headline in February captured the spirit of it: the King and citizens working side by side. Gyalsung trainees have been assigned to the chorten work through the months before the day.

One day, one in twenty

For 1 November itself, close to 40,000 people are needed on and around the structures — about one in twenty of Bhutan’s residents. The response has outrun the need. 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 instruction is 300 people to each chorten.

Kuensel’s list of who is coming reads like a portrait of the country: monks and farmers, students and retirees, professionals, and members of the diaspora. The sponsors behind the chortens make the same portrait from another side — the Royal Family, monastic institutions, the armed forces, civil servants, businesses, a foresters’ welfare fund, retired officials, Bhutanese abroad, and friends of Bhutan in Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.

What the symbolism is

Three things make the day more than a construction schedule.

It is voluntary. Nobody is ordered to Gelephu, and nobody is paid to be there. In a world where almost all large-scale work is either commanded or bought, forty thousand people giving a day of their labour freely is itself the statement. The Taj Mahal took some 20,000 workers twenty years, and legend — almost certainly untrue — says their hands were cut off at the end. Project 108 asks twice as many people for one day, and asks them freely (the comparison).

It is wholehearted. Zhabtog is undertaken with intention. Volunteers have cleared the corridor in the southern heat, programme after programme; monks at Sarpang Dzong have prepared the sacred relics through the summer, working on through a power cut in 32-degree heat. The work has been done in the spirit of an offering, not a shift.

It is one purpose. A pyramid could be built by teams who never saw one another’s work. A single day forces the opposite. Everyone must arrive, work and finish together, or the line is not complete. On the evening of 1 November, all 108 chortens either stand, or they do not — and whether they do depends on each of the forty thousand.

That is the meaning of the words His Majesty spoke in Gelephu: “there is no limit to what we can achieve when we stand together.”

An old idea, at a new scale

Buddhist history has seen something like this before. In 743 the Emperor Shōmu of Japan called on the whole country to help build a colossal bronze Buddha at Tōdai-ji, and enlisted a travelling monk, Gyōki, to gather support; the temple’s records say more than 2.6 million people contributed materials or labour. Those records also note a levy and hardship alongside the offerings.

What Bhutan is attempting is the voluntary version, in a single day: a country small enough that one in twenty of its people can stand on the same riverbank, and close-knit enough that they want to.

How the scale compares with the great monuments of history is set out in Project 108 by the Numbers. Why gathering people at this scale has become so rare almost everywhere is the subject of Great Monuments Today.