National Institute for Zorig Chusum (the Painting School)

The National Institute for Zorig Chusum is Bhutan’s government arts school, where students train in the thirteen traditional crafts. Visitors walk through the workshops while classes are working. Weekdays in term time only; allow 45 minutes to an hour.

What you’ll see

Rooms of teenagers learning to draw a Buddha’s eye correctly, and being corrected when they don’t.

Everyone calls it the painting school, and painting is the largest department — rows of students working at boards, building up a thangka pigment by pigment from a grid that has not changed in centuries. But the zorig chusum are thirteen crafts, not one, and the pleasure of the visit is walking from one workshop to the next: wood carvers cutting a lintel, clay sculptors building masks over armatures, embroiderers, weavers, metalworkers.

The thirteen are painting, sculpture, wood carving, wood turning, papermaking, bronze casting, embroidery, weaving, carpentry, masonry, bamboo and cane weaving, gold and silver smithing, and blacksmithing. Between them they account for everything you will admire in every dzong and temple on your trip — which is the thing worth carrying away from here. These are not preserved crafts. They are the building trades of a country that still builds this way.

Courses run four to six years depending on the discipline. Graduates go on to paint temples and restore dzongs; the pipeline is real.

There is a showroom selling student work, which is a better souvenir than most because you have just watched it being made.

When you can visit

Weekdays, in term time. It is closed at weekends and through the school holidays, and visiting hours are kept narrow so that classes aren’t disturbed — published times differ from source to source, so your guide checks.

If your Thimphu day falls on a Saturday, this and the National Library are the two things on the list you can’t do — while Tashichho Dzong, the market and the archery are all at their best. A Friday gets you both halves.

Manners

Ask before photographing a student at work, and don’t stand over anyone’s shoulder. They are being assessed on what they are doing while you watch.

How it fits your day

Kawajangsa, ten minutes up from the town centre, in the museum quarter — which makes an obvious morning with the Folk Heritage Museum, the National Library and the traditional medicine institute, all within a few hundred metres of each other, and Changangkha Lhakhang on the ridge just below.

If you want to see the papermaking craft at commercial scale after seeing it taught here, the Jungshi paper factory is down by the river.

See things to do in Thimphu for how everything compares.