Paro Tshechu

Five days below the dzong

Rinpung Dzong stands on a spur above the Paro river, and the tshechu is held on the ground beside it. The dzongkhag administration puts the festival on the eleventh to the fifteenth day of the second month of the Bhutanese calendar, with the ceremonies beginning on the tenth and ending on the sixteenth. Mask dances and folk dances are performed, it says, both by the monks and by laymen from the community. In the numbers of people who dance in it and who come to watch, this and the Thimphu tshechu are the two largest in the country.

The scroll

What everyone describes is the last morning. The thongdrel is a huge appliqué scroll — Wikipedia's article on tshechus gives it as thirty by forty-five metres — with Guru Rinpoche at the centre, his two consorts beside him and his eight manifestations around them. Paro's is embroidered in silver. It is carried down from the dzong in procession to the ground at Deyangkha and hung at about three in the morning, covering the front of a three-storey building. People come in the dark to stand in front of it, because the belief attached to a thongdrel is exactly what its name says: liberation by the sight of it. Before sunrise the rituals end and it is rolled up and taken back inside, not to be seen again for a year.

Between the dances

Among the dancers there is always at least one atsara, in a red mask with a long nose, who mocks the audience, interrupts the solemn dances and keeps the ground clear. He is not comic relief added later; the role belongs to the liturgy.

When it falls

Bhutan sets its festivals by its own lunar calendar, and no arithmetic on this site can produce the answer. The Association of Bhutanese Tour Operators publishes a schedule for the year ahead under the heading tentative festival dates, with the caution that they are tentative until confirmed by the respective dzong. Its 2027 list gives Paro as 18 to 22 March, thongdrel on the last day. Treat that as the week to ask about, not as a booking.