”With our passage through the bridge, behold a curious transformation.
For just as Alice, when she walked through the looking- glass, found
herself in a new whimsical world,
so we, when we crossed the Pa- Chu (river in Bhutan), found ourselves,
as though caught up on some magic time machine fitted fantastically
with a reverse,
flung back across the centuries in to the feudalism of a mediaeval age.”
- The Earl of Ronaldshay, 1921,
describing his arrival in Bhutan