Bhutan 🇧🇹

Filed under Asia and more precisely Southern Asia, Bhutan is a sovereign state. Its full official name is Kingdom of Bhutan. Its seat of government is Thimphu.

The land area is 38,394 km², which ranks it 137th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Switzerland and just ahead of Taiwan. That makes it a fraction smaller than Switzerland.

The population is about 791,524, placing it 166th of 249 by population — between the Solomon Islands above it and Macau below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 8th of 9 in size and 8th in population.

Bhutan has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: India and China have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Bhutan's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Bhutan's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇮🇳 India
• 🇨🇳 China

Plotted on a globe it falls at 27.5° north, 90.5° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,061 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Algeria, Egypt and Kuwait — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 2: China and India. The largest of them by area is China, while the most populous is India. Together those neighbours hold about 2.86 billion people.

This is one of the world's landlocked countries. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, and it means every shipment in or out has to cross someone else's border first. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Bhutan ranks 137th of 249 by area and 166th by population. That works out at 0.026% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Bhutan in the size ordering are Switzerland at 41,284 km² and Taiwan at 36,193 km², against Bhutan's 38,394 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Bhutan averages 21 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 202nd of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

Spread across 38,394 km², that works out at about 21 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

The one official language is Dzongkha. No other entry in this dataset lists Dzongkha, so on this list it stands alone.

Someone from Bhutan is a Bhutanese.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 47th most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Southern Asia.

Zoom in from the world to Southern Asia and Bhutan sits 8th of 9 by population and 8th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Sri Lanka just above and Maldives just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

India is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Southern Asia has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka
• 🇲🇻 Maldives
• 🇮🇳 India

Bhutan does not have the Indian rupee to itself. It is one of 3 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is INR, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in INR travels further than you might expect.

Dzongkha is listed for Bhutan and for no other entry on this site. A language confined to one country is unusual, and it is normally a sign of long isolation or of deliberate revival.

More than one currency circulates: Bhutanese ngultrum (BTN) and Indian rupee (INR). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Bhutan.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Bhutan, the answer is Thimphu.

Its internet country code is .bt. The international dialling code is +975. Standard country codes: bt and BTN.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.