Tshewang Dendup owns the only denim gho in existence. He also plays a mean air guitar, hangs a Che Guevara poster in his living room, and often wears his hair so long he pulls it back into a ponytail. A rebel in the making? Not quite. Dendup, 38, runs the news department at the government-financed Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS), the country’s only television station. The son of a weaver and a lay Buddhist priest, Dendup strives to balance tradition and modernity. “If we only had the old, we’d still be cocooned here, left out of the wider world,” Dendup says. “But if we only had the modern, we would have lost our culture. We need both to survive.” He’s confident that technology and tradition can blend, citing the CD player he bought for his father, who had never seen such a gadget before and who now pulls out the machine to play sermons and chants for his guests.

Cultural vitality resists easy measurement. Is it a zero-sum game, in which every Britney Spears video signifies an irretrievable loss, sending Bhutanese traditions one more step toward extinction? Or is it more like three-dimensional chess, a complex arrangement in which Buddhism and Game Boys can live side by side?

If optimists like Dendup are right, Bhutan’s emergence is invigorating local culture. As modern communications spread—28 percent of households now own a television, 11 percent a cell phone, about 3 percent a computer—citizens are connecting with each other as well as the rest of the world. This is no small achievement in Bhutan, whose only cross-country road is so slow, narrow, and sinuous that it takes three days to traverse the 150 miles (as the raven flies) from east to west. Villagers separated by mountains now share the experience of watching their national TV network. New radio stations, such as Kuzoo FM, bring young people together to talk about music, culture, and modernization. In 2006 the king even allowed two independent newspapers to emerge as alternative voices to Kuensel, still seen by many as the official mouthpiece.