Four festivals on this page, and every one of them happens in the courtyard of a fortress-monastery. Bhutan keeps its own lunar calendar, so none of these dates can be worked out by arithmetic — they are the tentative ones the tour operators' association publishes, and they move.
Photo: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Tshechu is Dzongkha for "day ten", and that is what these festivals are — the tenth day of a month of the Bhutanese lunar calendar, kept in honour of Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century master credited with bringing Buddhism to the country. Every district has one. The dances are cham, masked and danced by monks and by laymen, and on the last morning of the larger ones a thongdrel, an appliqué scroll several storeys high, is hung before dawn and rolled away again before the sun touches it.
The Bhutanese calendar is not one this site can compute, and Bhutan does not publish its festival dates as a rule that would let anyone else compute them either. What exists is a list: the Association of Bhutanese Tour Operators puts out a schedule for the coming year, headed tentative, with the note that dates are tentative until confirmed by the respective dzong. Every date here is taken from that list and is labelled estimated. That is not a formality. Plan around them, and ask again close to the time before you buy anything you cannot give back.
The drum dance of Drametse is on the page for a different reason. It is not a district tshechu with a published date but a dance from one monastery in the east, inscribed by UNESCO in 2008, offered twice a year at Drametse itself and now performed at tshechus across the country. Its own festival has no date in the national list at all.
Men from nine village blocks dress as warriors and fight the battle of 1639 again in the courtyard of Punakha Dzong, between two rivers. Three days of that, then three days of mask dances, and at the end the Je Khenpo throws oranges into the Mo Chhu.
February 13 – 15, 2027Estimated
Five days of masked dance in the courtyard below Rinpung Dzong, and then, on the last morning before dawn, a scroll the size of a three-storey building is raised in the dark, looked at by thousands of people, and rolled away again before the sun reaches it.
March 18 – 22, 2027Estimated
The capital's tshechu fills the courtyard of Tashichho Dzong for three days in autumn. It is the one Bhutanese festival that most people in the country have been to, and the seat of government becomes, for those days, a dance ground with several thousand people sitting around it.
October 10 – 12, 2027Estimated
Sixteen men in animal masks and monastic robes, each with a drum, dance at one monastery on a ridge in eastern Bhutan. UNESCO inscribed it in 2008. It is offered twice a year at Drametse itself, and by now it is danced at tshechus all over the country.