Kingdom of Bhutan is tucked away it the extreme eastern Himalayas, sharing its borders with China and India. Its perimeter stretches for about 1075 kilometers, out of which it shares 470 kilometers of its border to the north and northwest with Tibet Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China and 605 kilometers of its border to the south, southwest and east with the Republic of India. The Indian states bordering Bhutan in clockwise order are Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal and Sikkim. Other nations that are close neighbors to Bhutan are Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar (previously known as Burma) that are separated only by very small stretches of Indian Territory. The Kingdom of Nepal lies to its west, the People's Republic of Bangladesh is towards the south of Bhutan while the Union of Myanmar is to its southeast.
Bhutan is small and compact and is almost a square, though it has more length than width and the total area of the nation is approximate 47,000 km². Politically, it is divided into 20 dzongkhag (meaning district) that are further subdivided into 201 gewog (meaning constituency or group of villages, cities or towns). Since, it is a landlocked nation, situated inland, it has no territorial waters under its control just like Switzerland. At the time when India was under the control of British East India Company, Bhutan's territory extended into the present-day Indian state of Assam and the then kingdom of Cooch Behar, but in 1772, British started fighting back and pushing back its borders and cutting down on Bhutan’s size. There were number of wars and treaties for about hundred years until the Treaty of Sinchulu of 1865, when Bhutan manages to wrench out some of its borderland back.
