Things to do in Tsirang

Tsirang is Bhutan's smallest dzongkhag — 639 km² — and Damphu is its town. It is a road district: gentle, farmed and green, on the highway between Gelephu and the valleys to the north. You sleep here on the way through, or you break the drive here without staying. There is one attraction here, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

The one thing to see

Damphu — the district headquarters, at about 1,570 metres on the Sarpang–Wangdue highway. What is worth the stop is one building: a single temple with two doors, Buddhist on the right and Hindu on the left, in the middle of town, each side run by its own religious body. The dzongkhag describes it in exactly those terms, and there is nothing else like it anywhere on this site.

Tsirang Dzong is in Damphu too, and we will be straight about it: nothing is published about when it was built or what a visitor can see inside, so it gets a sentence here rather than a page of its own. The district's rituals and its annual tshechu happen at the Tsirang Namgyel Chholing Rabdey Dratshang, not at the dzong — that is the dzongkhag's own account, and it is the more useful one.

Entrance is included in every tour we run — no ticket window, no cash to carry.

What actually fits in a stop?

A night, or an hour. Both of our itineraries come through Tsirang and they treat it differently, which is the honest answer.

On the birding trip it is 97 km and about three hours in from Gelephu, a night in the district, then 100 km and about three hours on north the next morning. Damphu town is on the day's list of stops.

On the motorbike tour Tsirang is passed through, not slept in: the day is Gelephu to Punakha, 195 km and six hours, and this district is the middle of it.

Road works on the Punatsangchhu stretch have been moving the northbound times around, so ask us for the current one rather than planning to the hour.

Is Tsirang the same place as Chirang?

It is the old spelling of this district — and it is also a district of Assam, in India, which is a different place entirely.

Tsirang was written Chirang before the current romanisation settled, so older books, maps and records use that name for this dzongkhag. Meanwhile India has its own Chirang district, over the border in Assam, next to Kokrajhar — and our own Sarpang page names it, because Sarpang is the district that actually faces it.

So: Chirang the old name is here. Chirang the Indian district is not, and never was part of Bhutan. If a source about "Chirang" is about tea gardens or the Bodoland region, it is the Assam one.

The rest of the district

639 km² makes Tsirang the smallest of Bhutan's twenty dzongkhags — the next smallest, Pemagatshel, is more than half as big again. It holds 23,493 people on the dzongkhag's own 2021 figures, across twelve gewogs — Barshong, Doongalagang, Gosarling, Kilkhorthang, Mendrelgang, Patshaling, Phuentenchu, Rangthaling, Semjong, Sergithang, Tsholingkhar and Tsirangtoed — with 60 chiwogs and no dungkhag in between.

The district runs from about 500 m to about 1,900 m, which is the whole reason it looks the way it does: no snow, no high passes, and terraced farmland instead — 87.5 per cent of it under forest. One of Bhutan's longest rivers, the Punatsang Chhu, known downstream as the Sankosh, flows through it.

Part of Jigme Singye Wangchuck National Park reaches into Tsirang. You will read the opposite — that this is one of the few dzongkhags with no protected area — on more than one website, including the district's own. It is not right: the Department of Forests and Park Services says in its own management plan for the park that Sergithang and Phuentenchu gewogs both have parts inside it, about a tenth of the first and a seventh of the second. It is the same park that covers most of Trongsa.

Tsirang sits between Sarpang to the east and Dagana to the west, with Wangdue Phodrang to the north. Like the rest of southern Bhutan it is Lhotshamkha-speaking country as well as Dzongkha-speaking — see Bhutan's culture, language and people for how that fits together.

When to come

October to April. Damphu sits at about 1,570 m, which makes Tsirang milder than the border plains below it and warmer than the valleys above — comfortable through the winter, when much of Bhutan is cold. The monsoon runs June to August and is heavy here: the national weather service puts Damphu's July average at over 450 mm of rain, which makes both the driving and the walking hard work.