Bhutan Emoji & Symbols

The Bhutan flag emoji 🇧🇹 is divided diagonally from the lower hoist corner: the upper half is yellow, for the secular authority of the king, the lower half orange, for the Buddhist spiritual tradition, and across the line lies a white dragon holding jewels in its claws, for the wealth and security of the country. Like every country flag emoji it is two regional indicator letters, 🇧 and 🇹, for the code BT; phones and Macs join them into a flag, while Windows shows the two letters.

The dragon is Druk, the thunder dragon. Bhutanese call their country Druk Yul, the Land of the Thunder Dragon, the king is the Druk Gyalpo, the Dragon King, and the airline is Druk Air. The Drukpa school takes its name from a legend that its founder Tsangpa Gyare saw nine dragons rise into the sky at Namdruk in Tibet. So 🐉 or 🐲 with ⚡ or 🌩️ says Bhutan as clearly as the flag does, and 💎 stands for the norbu, the wish-fulfilling jewels in the dragon's claws.

The national emblem repeats the story in Buddhist symbols that have their own Unicode characters: a crossed double thunderbolt ࿇ (the dorje) set above a lotus ࿆, topped by a jewel ࿉ and framed by two dragons. Copy them from the grid; they are part of the Tibetan block, so they show on most phones and computers.

Bhutan national symbols: raven 🐦‍⬛, cypress 🌲, takin and happiness 😊

The national bird is the raven 🐦‍⬛. A raven's head crowns the Raven Crown 👑 that the kings of Bhutan wear, a sign of Legön Jarog Dongchen, a protective deity in raven form. The national tree is the cypress 🌲, planted around dzongs and temples, and forests cover most of the country: the constitution requires that at least 60 percent of the land stays forested, which is why Bhutan absorbs more carbon than it emits.

The national animal is the takin, a shaggy goat-antelope of the high pastures, and it has no emoji. Bhutanese tell why it looks so odd: the saint Drukpa Kunley, the Divine Madman, ate a whole cow and a goat at a feast, then put the goat's head on the cow's bones and brought it to life. The legend gives the best way to write it, 🐐+🐄. The national flower, the blue poppy of the high meadows, has no emoji either.

😊 stands for Gross National Happiness, the idea, credited to the fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, that a government should measure the wellbeing of its people and not only its economy. Bhutan still surveys it, and it is the first thing many people abroad know about the country.

Bhutanese food emoji: ema datshi 🌶️🧀, red rice 🍚 and butter tea

Ema datshi, chillies cooked in cheese, is the national dish, and 🌶️🧀 is how people write it. In Bhutan chillies are eaten as a vegetable, not a spice; they hang drying on roofs in autumn. The cheese is datshi, made from cow's or yak's milk. Meals come with red rice 🍚 grown in the valleys, and with dishes such as kewa datshi (potatoes and cheese) and shamu datshi (mushrooms 🍄 and cheese). 🥟 is momo, the dumpling; in Haa the buckwheat version is called hoentay. Bumthang in the centre is buckwheat country, with khuli pancakes 🥞 and puta noodles 🍜.

To drink there is suja, salted butter tea (🧈🍵), and ara 🍶, a home-distilled spirit of rice, maize or millet, offered to guests and at festivals. 🍎 and 🍊 are Bhutan's main fruit exports, apples from the high valleys and oranges from the south.

Buddhist symbols, dzongs and Tshechu festival emoji

Bhutan's constitution names Buddhism the country's spiritual heritage, and the Drukpa school of Vajrayana Buddhism runs through daily life. ☸️ the wheel of dharma, 🙏, the prayer beads 📿 and the butter lamp 🪔 are the emoji people use for it, 🧘 for meditation. For ritual objects there are Unicode characters too: the dorje ࿅ and the bell ࿄, held together in prayer, and ࿋, a three-part swirl like the gakyil, the wheel of joy painted on temple walls and doors. Prayer flags, the five-coloured strings on every pass and bridge, have no emoji; 🟦⬜🟥🟩🟨 in their colours of blue, white, red, green and yellow is the usual stand-in.

Most districts are run from a dzong, a whitewashed fortress-monastery that houses both the monks and the local government, such as Punakha Dzong where two rivers meet. 🏯 is the nearest emoji. Paro Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest, clings to a cliff high above the Paro valley where Guru Rinpoche is said to have flown on the back of a tigress, so 🐅🏯 or 🐅⛰️ is the usual way to write it. 🛕 is also used for monasteries. In the south many Nepali-speaking Bhutanese are Hindu, and 🕉️ and Dashain, a public holiday, belong to the country too.

A Tshechu is a festival held on the tenth day of a lunar month in honour of Guru Rinpoche, when monks and laymen in masks and silk robes perform the cham dances in the dzong courtyard to drums 🥁 and long horns. 🎭 and 👹 are the emoji people send for the masks. At dawn on the last day of some Tshechus, such as Paro's, a huge appliqué thangka called a thongdrel is unrolled on the dzong wall, and seeing it is believed to cleanse sins. 🎉🇧🇹 goes with National Day on 17 December, the anniversary of the crowning of the first king in 1907, and with Losar, the New Year.

Bhutan emoji for mountains, archery and travel

🏔️ and ⛰️ are the Himalaya along the northern border. Bhutan does not allow its high peaks to be climbed, out of respect for the mountain deities, so Gangkhar Puensum (7,570 m) is often called the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. 🌄 and 🏞️ are its valleys, 🥾 the treks across the passes. In the forests live the Bengal tiger 🐅, which is found here at unusual heights, the snow leopard 🐆 higher up, the golden langur 🐒 and the Bhutan glory 🦋, the national butterfly.

Archery 🏹 is the national sport. In the traditional game the targets stand about 145 metres apart, twice the Olympic distance, and while one team shoots the other sings, dances and teases; a hit is greeted with a song and a dance in front of the target 🎯. Khuru, a game of heavy darts thrown at a target, is played the same way. ⚽ is the most popular modern sport.

✈️ is Paro, one of Bhutan's two international airports, set in a deep valley where only a small group of specially trained pilots are allowed to land. 👘 is the nearest emoji to the national dress, the gho for men and the kira for women, worn to school, to work and to every dzong.

Dzongkha letters and the ngultrum: how to type them

Dzongkha, "the language of the dzong", is the national language, written in the Tibetan script. Its alphabet has 30 consonants, taught in rows of four: ཀ ཁ ག ང, ཅ ཆ ཇ ཉ, ཏ ཐ ད ན and so on to ཧ ཨ. Each consonant carries the vowel a; the four vowel signs ི ུ ེ ོ change it to i, u, e or o, and further letters can be written above or below it, as in the ྲ of འབྲུག་ (druk, dragon). A small dot, the tsheg ་, ends every syllable, and the shad ། ends a phrase or sentence, as in འབྲུག་ཡུལ། Druk Yul. Texts open with the head marks ༄༅, and ༀ is the syllable om. Dzongkha also has its own digits ༠ ༡ ༢ ༣ ༤ ༥ ༦ ༧ ༨ ༩. All subjoined letters are in our Dzongkha Letters collection.

To type Dzongkha, add its keyboard: Windows includes one; macOS users can install the DDC's Dzongkha layout, and phone keyboards such as Gboard offer it too. You can also copy the letters and marks from the grid above.

The currency is the ngultrum, code BTN, divided into 100 chhertum. It has no symbol of its own in Unicode: Bhutanese write Nu. before the amount, as in Nu. 500. The ngultrum is pegged one to one to the Indian rupee, and Indian rupees also circulate in Bhutan.

The National Statistics Bureau projects Bhutan's 2026 population at 790,718. Roughly 420,000 of them speak Dzongkha, about 150,000 Nepali, mostly in the south, and about 100,000 use English, the language of school teaching; dozens of other languages, such as Sharchop in the east, are spoken too. Nepali and English have their own collections, and so does India, Bhutan's neighbour and closest partner.