Overlooking Thimphu, Bhutan's capital and the closest thing it has to a city, is a 9,000-foot hill called Sangyegang. At the top of it, where the long, thin, spear-tipped prayer flags never stop rippling -- and you can serenely take in the full valley, if not the whole epic impermanent cosmicness of it all -- a red carpet adorned with loose elaborate patterns of dyed rice has been rolled to the door of a modest one-story structure. There, from behind a wood lectern, Queen Ashi Tshering Pem Wangchuck, the second oldest of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck's four wives -- all sisters -- steps up to address an audience of A-list monks, ministers and dignitaries.
This afternoon's ceremony in June falls in the middle of a weeklong celebration of King Wangchuck's silver jubilee, and the Queen begins by recapping the milestones of her husband's reign. In the last 25 years, Bhutan has added its first system of paved roads and telephones, an airport and a two-plane airline and enough hospitals and clinics to extend the average citizen's life span by two decades, to 66. And the day before, in a ceremony presided over by the oldest Queen, the country went on line. But now this last and most willfully isolationist of the Buddhist Himalayan kingdoms, which through cunning, diplomacy and blind geographic luck has somehow avoided getting overrun by history, is bracing itself for the most pitiless invader ever loosed upon this world: television. In two hours, a consultant from Hong Kong will throw a switch in the little studio behind the Queen, and Bhutan will begin bouncing one-kilowatt broadcast signals off its age-old hills.
The Bhutanese have long brought up the rear in the global race toward modernity. Serfdom didn't become illegal here until 1958 -- and 10 miles outside Thimphu you're still practically in the Middle Ages. Eighty-five percent of the country's 600,000 people are entirely occupied by subsistence agriculture, and are so scattered among remote villages that most of them live at least a day's walk from the nearest road. On the nausea-inducing two-hour drive from the airport at Paro, you pass through scenes of such scale and emptiness they could have been created from Beckett's stage notes. A couple sit on a mound staring wordlessly at the mute hills. A woman of indeterminate age, stooped under an unidentifiable burden, walks through a landscape so desolate there is no inkling of where she might have taken up her load or hopes to put it down.
The novice traveler might conclude from such scenes that a little TV could hardly do these folks much harm; at least they could sit and stare at something that moves faster than plate tectonics. But despite its poverty -- the average annual income is $550 -- Bhutan has never viewed the preservation of its culture as an indulgence, and has expended considerable resources in its defense. In the late 70's, the King coined the phrase ''Gross National Happiness'' to emphasize that unlike other developing nations, Bhutan would not be bullied into measuring its progress purely in material terms. He established commissions to maintain the country's 2,000 active monasteries, introduced driglam namsha, the ancient code of conduct, into the school curriculum and eschewed the easy money of tourism. Last year, Bhutan, which doesn't maintain an embassy in America, admitted only 6,000 visitors, while Nepal, its neighbor to the west, took in 500,000.
As today's tradition-steeped ceremony suggests, Bhutan is determined to access the latest technologies without losing its distinct national self, to cut some kind of unique deal between the old and the new and travel what an official planning document calls ''the Middle Path.'' In fact, the country's tortured decision to set up its own television network -- called the Bhutan Broadcasting Service, or BBS -- has not been made as a concession to Western culture but as an attempt to thwart it. For now at least, the BBS will be broadcast only in Thimphu, be limited to a few hours a day and will consist entirely of national news and documentaries about the Bhutanese themselves. The hope is that TV will paradoxically help remind the ancient people of the Dragon Kingdom who they are, not who they aren't.
Keeping Pandora's box only halfway open won't be easy. Even before the country's ban on satellite dishes was unofficially lifted just in time for last year's World Cup, 2,000 were already despoiling the landscape and the less affluent satisfied their Hollywood (and Bollywood) requirements through imported videos. And even if the initial content is a snooze, now that a broadcast infrastructure is in place, it seems as if it's only a matter of time before another ancient culture fades to black.
Set up on a small wood table beside the red carpet is a 21-inch Malaysian-made Sony. With a pair of rabbit ears spread-eagled atop it like a crown, it seems far more imperious and regal than the Queen herself. The Queen concludes her remarks, unties the white ribbon at the threshold of the studio, then turns toward the television. It's like watching a bloodless coup. Acknowledging the transfer of power, the screen blooms forth with that universal symbol of hope and desire: the color bars.
I wish I could say that I'm the only Western reporter privileged to observe this curious moment in our planet's cultural history, but in fact there are some 30 of us standing behind a waist-high rope just to the left of the Queen. Among those chasing the same droll scoop are a magazine writer from Hamburg, a Reuters reporter from London, TV crews from Paris and Copenhagen and a phalanx of journalists from India, which borders Bhutan to the south. One Indian radio reporter bends down in front of the set and holds her microphone up to its speaker to record for posterity the exact instant of Bhutan's capitulation.
Clearly, TV moving into virgin territory holds a dark fascination to the already vanquished. Perhaps it's a chance to observe in a kind of controlled experiment just how pernicious the medium really is. But it's hard to believe we can bring much objectivity to this morbid rubbernecking; it's like ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' being chronicled by people who are already one of ''them.''
Recent data from other previously unexposed pockets of the world are contradictory. An analysis on the effect of television on young children on St. Helena, a small South Atlantic island 1,000 miles off the coast of Angola that began broadcasting TV in 1995, indicates that the behavior of its children actually improved after two years of watching the tube; the researchers pointed to an explanation by noting that on St. Helena, TV watching is a collective family activity. This news is offset by darker findings on Fiji. Researchers claim that since the arrival of Heather Locklear on that South Pacific island -- where ''You've gained weight'' is a traditional compliment -- formerly content Gauguin-esque teen-age girls are suffering from alarming rates of bulimia and low self-esteem. TV's impact in Bhutan is sure to be equally scrutinized, for it is one of the very last countries on the planet to get plugged in. Aside from anarchic Somalia and a few laggards like Malawi and the Comoro islands, broadcast TV has pretty much conquered the globe.
That said, there is something embarrassing about the size and single-mindedness of the press in Bhutan this week. To high-ranking officials, the start of television is no more than a footnote in Bhutan's decades-long success story, and so at first they are surprised and delighted that the world seems to have so much interest in the celebration of ''His Majesty's 25 Years of Enthronement.'' Upon arrival, each visiting journalist receives a stack of beautifully inscribed invitations to some half-dozen ceremonies and parties staged with great flair at temples, fortresslike structures called dzongs and other historic settings. But almost invariably, the press blows them off if they aren't directly connected to the tube. We have come to write about ourselves, not them.
As soon as the ceremony ends, each journalist and his assigned press liaison officer race to their waiting cars and drivers to hustle back down into Thimphu in time to catch the first television broadcast at the home of a ''real'' Bhutanese family. All of us are looking for a scene with just that right degree of incongruity to frame this clash of ancient and modern cultures.
I secure a booking in a part of Thimphu called the Lower Market. The house I am staying in is a traditional three-story structure with the first floor a kind of barn and the top floor an open-air shed for drying yak. Only the second, reached by steep outdoor stairs with railings as worn as an old subway turnstile, is reserved for eating, sleeping -- and, now, TV.
By the time I barge in, three generations of the Tshering family, as well as assorted neighbors and cousins, are seated on the polished wood floor looking expectantly at the Sony in the corner, from which a 30-foot blue wire has been jury-rigged to run from the set, across the room, through another room and out a window to an antenna bolted to the roof. The broadcast starts about 15 minutes late, just as the audience is starting to get restless. At first the picture is terrible, but after a neighbor adjusts the dials with savantlike precision, it comes in as clean as Manhattan cable.
The broadcast features the King's address that morning to about 15,000 of his subjects packed into the stone bleachers overlooking the Changlingmithang sports stadium. King Wangchuck speaks briefly and modestly about the progress the country has made, and then walks out onto the stadium's grassy field, with essentially no security, to greet his guests. After visiting the bleachers to say hello to his people, the tall, elegant 43-year-old King -- wearing a yellow kiltlike gho and ceremonial boots -- goes to the center of the field to lead a performance of the tshilebey, which traditionally ends major Bhutanese celebrations. This chain dance, in which everyone in line performs a couple of very simple slow steps, is somewhere between a hora and the sun dance at Club Med.
With its supple editing and lighting, the television production is surprisingly professional, and most of the people in the Tsherings' house sit rapt throughout. The 67-year-old family patriarch, whose large shaved head has the ferocious mien of a marauding hun, and his 74-year-old wife, who has the severely stooped shoulders of a longtime farmer, have never seen a television broadcast before and don't seem quite sure if they should respond to it as official ceremony or routine entertainment, and so they take it in with respectful silence. On the other hand, their daughter, Chenko, spends most of the broadcast chatting, barely paying attention. She has friends with satellite dishes -- and today's broadcast strikes her as pretty slow going.
The show signs off with a soothing Buddhist prayer. Just before this final fade-out, however, I notice how much air time has been snagged by a huge balloon hanging over the field bearing congratulations for the King from Penden Cement. It is the first brilliant media buy of Bhutan's television age.
The headquarters of the Bhutan Broadcasting Service are located just outside Thimphu, in the hillside ''suburb'' of Chubachu. With its elegant stone entrance and foul, barely functioning bathrooms, the building has the feel of a rebel-seized embassy. Two days before the first broadcast, I arrive to chat with Sonam Tshong, the man in charge of the fledgling network. From his large second-floor office, he blithely admits that many key questions about the BBS won't be sorted out for months.
For example, At what time will broadcasts begin? ''It depends on your target,'' Sonam says. ''If we want to reach the Government bureaucrats, most of whom are busy at evening cocktail parties, 9 may be better, but for the ordinary people, 6 or 7:30 is suitable.'' Since the debut, the starting air time has vacillated among these times.
Then there's the question of paid advertising. TV was put on earth to breed cellulite and desire, but Sonam isn't even going to try to sell air time for now. ''The commercial economy here is too small,'' he says. Although street-level capitalism percolates in Thimphu, the country is still sustained by a trompe l'oeil economy based on the largesse of India and the relative lack of greed of the King. When Bhutan's northern neighbor, Tibet, was annexed by Communist China in 1959, the late King, Wangchuck's father, turned to India for help. The several hundred million dollars in rupees pumped into Bhutan each year by New Delhi are considered a bargain for the comfort of keeping a 300-mile wall of Himalayas between itself and China.
Another factor behind Sonam's decision to forgo advertising may be the tiny projected audience. Although TV's have been moving briskly since the announcement of plans to broadcast here -- Thimphu's electronic stores report selling 100 a week -- nobody knows precisely how many sets are out there. ''There's a minimum of 3,000,'' Sonam says. ''And then you can figure six people watching each one. But there may be far more sets.'' For now, 30,000 viewers is about the maximum conceivable size of the audience. Since even the smallest and cheapest Indian set costs about $100 -- more than two months' salary for the average Bhutanese citizen -- the audience will probably remain elite for some time. To take TV to the masses, the Government is considering plugging in sets at community centers and libraries.
Meanwhile, Sonam's most pressing project is picking Bhutan's first TV stars -- the talking heads for the news broadcasts. Although the winners of the talent search will immediately have the most recognizable faces and torsos in Bhutan outside of the King's, the competition has been about as fierce as you might expect for the presidency of a junior-high-school chess club. Nobody has lobbied to go on the air, and just getting people to audition is a chore. In Bhutan, where even revered artists leave their work unsigned, and the whole population shares a birthday -- everyone gets a year older together in February, on the first day of the lunar calendar -- there is no culture of celebrity yet, and without it, the prospect of reading through a stack of paper under a hot light is exactly as alluring as it sounds.
The afternoon of my visit, one reluctant candidate, Rinchin Choiden, sits in front of a tacked-up blue chromatic in the back of a large room crowded with stray furniture and drones into the lens in a disembodied monotone. When she comes up for air, Sonam's colleague Siok Siong Pek schools her in the finer points of the news reader's art. ''You're not projecting,'' she says. ''And you have to stop spinning in your chair.'' The biggest problem, however, is that Rinchin -- whose deep brown eyes and ruddy, windblown cheeks suggest a younger and much more Mongolian Diane Sawyer -- lacks that profoundly heartfelt sense of empathy and just plain caring that any Western newscaster can feign in her sleep. ''More warmth in the beginning!'' Pek says. ''Open with a nice smile. And you've got to do something about your hair.''
A few days after the first broadcast, I head back up to BBS to meet a film crew that is going out to videotape reaction to the new medium. When I arrive, however, the crew is nowhere in sight, and even though it's almost an hour to air time, everyone has gone home except for a quiet, powerfully built video editor named Ugyen -- who when I met him a couple of days earlier described himself as ''a peasant from Paro.'' I ask him to guide me to some novice TV watchers. At first he declines, but after a couple of minutes of pleading, we're trudging down Chubachu toward the bright lights of Thimphu.
When we reach the city proper, the streets, closed off to cars for the celebration, have a packed-fairground expectancy. Thimphu is no more than a handful of paved blocks, but it's as intensely urban as any place I've ever been, a raw, dirty Eastern outpost of a town, with open sewers, tight, dark alleys and a glut of shopping stalls and grubby little hotels. Here, the Bhutanese are discovering the savage elbow-rubbing thrill of city life. It's more Chinatown than Shangri-La.
As we slip into the nocturnal current, Ugyen begins to shed his exhaustion, and after a quick stop at a closet-size shop where he purchases a single cigarette and a packet of doma -- a chaw of green leaf, betel nut and a white-lime paste that gives the soon addicted consumer a mild buzz and orange iridescent teeth -- he gets almost talkative. ''What is important about TV is that we are seeing ourselves on-screen for the first time,'' he says. ''That is something totally different, and so in the beginning no matter what we put on, it is going to be a hit.'' He tells me that last night, a friend had 64 neighbors at his house watching the broadcast, which featured yet more coverage of the celebration.
Outside a hotel, we encounter a good-size crowd forming a half-circle around a glowing core, and wriggling closer, I can see that it is in fact a television. But there's no antenna, and after 30 seconds of watching the young couple on-screen walk and talk in a sparse forest in excruciatingly slow real time, Ugyen confirms that it's the video of a popular Buddhist movie.
Just below us in the wide intersection of two of the town's biggest streets, a pair of comedians -- one stocky, the other rail-thin -- are working a huge shoulder-to-shoulder crowd from the back of a parked truck. They wear reddish ghos and deliver their setups and punch lines in the guttural barbaric yawp of the Bhutanese mother tongue, called Dzongkha. Although one day soon they will no doubt make their debut on the BBS -- maybe even be the hosts of their own comedy special before turning to movies and directing -- their performance, which is absolutely killing people, feels as if it could have been lifted from a medieval courtyard.
''What are they talking about?'' I ask Ugyen.
''Doctors, taxi drivers,'' he says. ''The way prices are going up. Everyday life.''
''Have you ever heard them before?''
''Of course,'' Ugyen says. ''They're famous. Everybody knows them.'' He writes out their names for me on my notebook: Phurba Thinley and Gyem Tshering.
Moving on, we soon make another sighting about halfway up a back street -- a flickering blue light outside Sonam Thinley's grocery. We stand on the curb like accomplices at a game of three-card monte and catch up on the local news. We watch a segment Ugyen himself edited. It is about the girl's basketball tournament at a local sports center. Basketball? I thought the big Bhutanese sport was archery. It was, Ugyen explains, but now with the blessing of the King -- who has had videotapes of N.B.A. games shipped to him from New York for the past several years -- hoop is huge in Thimphu.
Although the audience is nothing compared with that drawn by the comedians and even smaller than that gathered for the Buddhist movie, the show has stopped about 10 pedestrians in their tracks. Those who drop off and move on are gradually replaced. Yet there is no sense that they feel as if they are witnessing anything of historical import. Of course, that's how TV works -- it sneaks up on you.
The tall Bhutanese-style chalet where the 15-year-old Amin lives with his family just outside Thimphu has panoramic Himalayan views from every window. But Amin, a bony kid in a ''Titanic'' T-shirt, only has eyes for Loveleen -- a girl not much older than himself, dancing with conviction on ''Boogie Woogie,'' a game show brought to him via satellite each weekday afternoon by Colgate toothpaste.
Amin's family has been quietly reeling in inappropriate programming since installing a dish last summer. They watch ''Chicago Hope'' and ''Friends'' as well as British shows like ''Thomas the Tank Engine'' and ''Teletubbies.'' And they're briefed by BBC and CNN.
Watching with Amin are his 9-year-old niece, 32-year-old sister, parents and grandmother, all sitting so stiff and still against one stark mud wall that they could be posing for a family portrait rather than watching breasts bounce. And although the images on the TV contrast abruptly with the lifesize painting of Buddha in the prayer room next door, where Amin's father has built an elaborate altar with row upon row of sacrificial water dishes and butter lamps, there is no indication that the family elders are the least bit discomforted by the boogie-woogieing.
Before getting its dish, Amin's family watched videos. Thimphu doesn't have a single traffic light, but it does have 25 video stores. One of the biggest, a shop run by Mani Orsang, rents 350 tapes a night. When I visit, Mani recommends the recent Brian De Palma bomb ''Snake Eyes.'' On the racks, I also see indie films like ''She's So Lovely'' and ''Shallow Grave'' -- neither of which I've seen.
One night, some Thimphu locals lead me down a back alley to an apartment-building basement that one day a week houses the dance club Ex -- so called because all three owners are divorced. I step into a dark, unventilated box where it's about 100 degrees and the strobe light on the low ceiling is reflected in the sweat on the floor. Here, the flower of Bhutan's youth, egged on by a mix of classic dance tunes and unrecognizable Indian mutations, is doing all one room can for Gross National Happiness.
Whenever the great timeless choruses arrive -- whether it's Wild Cherry's ''Play That Funky Music'' or Culture Club's ''Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?'' -- all the Buddhists in the house throw back their heads and yell them out in ecstasy, as if they have stumbled upon passwords to a better world. If I still hold out any hope for Bhutan's chances against pop, they die loud and hard at 2 in the morning. That's when I catch a glimpse of a young woman named Karma, a ferocious Mongolian beauty in a black sleeveless T-shirt, black slacks and white platform flip-flops. Her fists clenched, Karma makes funky little robot-doll moves as the speakers and dancers wail: ''I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world. . . . Come on, Barbie, let's go party!''
Although the BBS won't be filling Bhutan's airwaves with jiggly music videos any time soon, the network is open to home-grown programming. The person most likely to create Bhutan's first TV show is one of the country's very few up-from-the-streets entrepreneurs: Ugyen Dorji. His story, with its Horatio Alger trajectory, feels more American than Bhutanese. He started out in Thimphu selling vegetables, then bicycles, then toys, then clothes. At his garment shop he played music and then began to sell it, and it became the only place in town where people could buy cassettes. In the early 90's, he sold the shop, and in '95 built a recording studio from which he has already produced half a dozen CD's, including the local pop hit ''Hey, Girl.''
Soon after this, Ugyen dispatched an employee to India for a three-month crash course in video filming. When he returned, Ugyen produced Bhutan's first hit feature, ''Not Afraid to Die,'' a tear-jerker about a woman who falls in love with a handsome guy with a defective heart. He recouped the film's expenses -- and then some -- by showing it for two weeks at the Lugar theater in town and then buying some generators and taking it on the road. Ugyen has three more films in the pipeline, including one based on the real story of some picnicking schoolchildren who died after getting lost in the mountains. He hopes to show it on BBS. He has also talked to BBS officials about developing a TV series about a Thimphu detective.
If you start with a Bhutanese version of the nightly news and PBS, then jump almost instantly to ''Columbo'' and the Tragedy Movie of the Week, can a home-grown ''Regis and Kathie Lee'' be far behind? To an outsider, it's so obvious where all this is heading that you might as well roll the credits.
But Bhutan's leaders cling to the notion that they can negotiate with pop culture. In the ceremony for the initiation of ''Druknet,'' Bhutan's official Web site, the oldest Queen, Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, cheerfully announced that Bhutan would offer 10 days of free mail service to prevent E-mails from wiping out the art of letter writing. Then, evoking an image as vividly art-directed and patently false as one of I.B.M.'s ''Solutions for a Small Planet'' ads, she said, ''Bhutan's dream for the Internet is that its people will gain access to the whole world without ever having to leave the tranquillity of their tiny remote rural villages.''
Admittedly, inner Bhutan has a transcendent tranquillity. An hour's walk in either direction can take you from tropical jungles to an alpine ridge. Yet how many Bhutanese will want to stay put in their cozy villages once they've glimpsed the hubbub beyond? History strongly suggests that few people will choose to spend eight hours a day knee deep in mud behind an ox if there's an alternative.
In the end, the only way to slow modernization is to control it by force. That's what ultimately makes Bhutan's willed provincialism less than charming. In the name of preserving tradition, the most elemental details of your fate, from who gets educated and what you end up doing for a living, is decided from on high. This a country with a national dress code. The day television arrived in Bhutan, the country's chairman of the Council of Ministers said the decision to create a broadcast network was made because it was determined ''that our people had reached the level of intellectual development that was necessary.'' How much longer will the people of Bhutan -- 43 percent of whom are 15 or under -- be happy to turn all these matters over to their wise elders? If the King can have four wives, why can't Amin have Loveleen?
Even with the Himalayas at Bhutan's back and a beloved monarch at the helm, there's no stopping the translucent ooze of Western culture. Nevertheless, the Bhutanese are determined to put up a better fight than anyone else and go down swinging. Maybe they can last 5 years. Maybe 10. And by then, at least, maybe they'll have cable.
Peter de Jonge, co-author of "Miracle on the 17th Green," wrote about Amazon.com in March.