My current obsession – a book on the coinage of Bhutan – the task is turning out to be lot more daunting than I had imagined. In the process of my research I am making discoveries that baffle the mind and ridicule the established and the supposed. I am faced with some serious anomalies in the recorded histories – facts don’t match and some of them are simply impossible. Take for instance the following:
According to what we have been told, the terms Chettrums and Ngultrums were coined during the time when our printed currency notes were released in 1974. If that is true, then how did the following earliest of Bhutan’s postage stamps issued in 1962 and 1965 come to be denominated thus?
If our postage stamps were denominated in Chettrums and Ngultrums as far back as 1962, how did it happen that our metal coins issued much later were denominated as follows:
Puzzling!!!