For foreigners of progressive leanings, the values espoused in G.N.H. ignite the utopian imagination. And for Western travelers of all political persuasions, a visit to Bhutan can leave one sputtering Orientalist clichés. Bhutan presents itself as a startlingly different place. It is a land of astounding beauty, of soaring peaks and verdant valleys, of centuries-old rope bridges that stretch across white-water rapids. There are ancient monasteries nestled on craggy cliff-tops — and the terminal at the international airport resembles an ancient monastery. The law mandates that all buildings be built according to traditional Bhutanese designs, employing no nails or iron bars in their construction. Government workers and schoolchildren are required to wear traditional dress, kimonolike garments called gho (for men and boys) and kira (for women and girls). The majority of Bhutanese still live off the land, practicing subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry. Bhutan is the only country in the world whose state religion is Mahayana Buddhism. Its official language, Dzongkha, is spoken in few other places on earth — but all Bhutanese schoolchildren, even in the deepest countryside, are taught English. Bhutan only got television in 1999. There are no plastic bags allowed in Bhutan, and 72 percent of the country is under forest cover. In 2013, the government announced its intention to become the world’s first 100-percent organic-farming nation.

All of this has earned Bhutan a reputation in certain quarters as a dreamland, an unsullied Shangri-La. Government officials pooh-pooh this idea — yet they trade on it. Once, Bhutan admitted only 2,500 tourists each year; today that number has swollen to 100,000, with luxury resorts springing up in remote regions to lure wealthy adventure- and eco-travelers. Bhutan’s official tourist slogan makes a bald appeal to the “Eat, Pray, Love” crowd: “Happiness is a place.”

The realities of Bhutan, of course, are more complicated. On the streets of Thimphu, you will find drug rehabilitation clinics and pizza joints, and when children get out of school they discard their traditional Bhutanese dress for hoodies and skinny jeans. Nearly all of Bhutan’s roads and buildings are constructed by migrant laborers from India and Nepal, whose standard of living is far lower than anyone else’s in the country. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Bhutan expelled nearly 100,000 of its citizens, almost all of them Hindus of Nepalese origin, forcing them into refugee camps in eastern Nepal; refugees have alleged that the government purge involved torture and sexual violence. Homosexuality is illegal. Gender equality is a work in progress; fewer than 9 percent of the country’s nationally elected officials are women. Happiness, in Bhutan as elsewhere, is a goal, an ideal. A place, though — that’s a stretch.