evidence: Gyalaphug is, however, different: It is in Bhutan. Wu and a retinue of officials, police, and journalists had crossed an international border. They were in a 232-square-mile area claimed by China since the early 1980s but internationally understood as part of Lhuntse district in northern Bhutan. The Chinese officials were visiting to celebrate their success, unnoticed by the world, in planting settlers, security personnel, and military infrastructure within territory internationally and historically understood to be Bhutanese. [...] China has long renounced the 19th-century claims by Qing emperors—repeated by Mao Zedong in the 1930s—to sovereignty over Bhutan and other Himalayan states. Relations between China and Bhutan have been amicable since the early 1970s, when Bhutan supported China’s entry into the United Nations. As one Chinese official put it recently, the two countries are "friendly neighbors linked by mountains and rivers." But as with China’s other Himalayan neighbors, the legacies of colonialism and conflict have left behind uncertain borders. Since 1984, China and Bhutan have held 24 rounds of talks to settle their disagreements over those mountains and rivers, and this April they agreed to hold the 25th round "at an early date." (The 24th round was held in August 2016, just before the main construction work in the Beyul began.) Bhutan has shown remarkable flexibility in these talks—early on, probably in the 1980s, Thimphu quietly relinquished its claim to the 154-square-mile Kula Khari (sometimes written as Kulha Kangri) area on its northern border with China, describing that claim as due to "cartographic mistakes."