River · Bhutan
Manas (Drangme Chhu)
Manas is the longest river of Bhutan, a mountain kingdom in the Himalaya. It collects water from many valleys, rushes south through deep gorges and finally joins the Brahmaputra in the Indian state of Assam.
Picture credit: Dasdhritiman (CC BY-SA 4.0) · daimalu (CC BY 2.0) · daimalu (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Manas (Drangme Chhu)?
The river starts here: High valleys of eastern Bhutan.
It ends in the Brahmaputra River in Assam.
Countries on the river: Bhutan.
The story behind it
The Manas has two faces. High in the mountains it is a cold, clear stream that leaps over grey boulders between pine trees and rhododendron bushes. Further down it becomes wide and splits into many arms on beds of gravel. It passes through Royal Manas National Park, one of the wildest corners of Bhutan, where tigers, elephants, wild water buffalo and rare golden langurs live. Fish eagles watch from bare branches and otters hunt in the side channels. During the summer monsoon the water turns grey and strong, rolling stones and whole tree trunks downstream, so villages keep well back from the banks. Bhutan uses the power of such rivers to make electricity. In its last part the Manas crosses into India, where its water joins the giant Brahmaputra.
Questions children ask
How long is the Manas?
The whole river is about 400 kilometres long. Roughly the upper two thirds lie in Bhutan, where the river is also called Drangme Chhu.
Which countries does the Manas flow through?
It starts in Bhutan and flows through the mountains and hills of that country. Its lower part continues in India, in the state of Assam.
Where does the Manas end?
It flows into the Brahmaputra in Assam. That huge river carries the water onward to the Bay of Bengal, far to the south-east.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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