Chandra Bahadur Dangi, a Nepali man measured at 54.6 centimeters (21.5 inches) by Guinness World Records in 2012, was confirmed as the shortest adult human ever recorded—a designation that brought him global attention at the age of 72 after a lifetime largely lived in a remote mountain village.

Dangi was discovered by a contractor working near his village in the Dang district of western Nepal and brought to Guinness officials for measurement. His height is attributed to primordial dwarfism, a condition affecting a handful of people worldwide that results in uniform miniaturization of the body without the disproportionate limb-to-torso ratios typical of other forms of dwarfism.

The record broke the previous mark held by Junrey Balawing of the Philippines, who measured 59.93 centimeters. Guinness records two "shortest" categories—the all-time record and the current living record—and Dangi held both simultaneously.

His story illustrated the contrast between the global curiosity that extreme records generate and the actual lived experience of the people who hold them. Dangi spent most of his life farming in a community that had known him all his life, where his stature was simply part of who he was rather than a spectacle. The Guinness certification and subsequent media attention transformed him into an object of worldwide fascination overnight.

Dangi traveled to London for the official certification ceremony and subsequently participated in Guinness's promotional activities. He died in 2015 at the age of 75, having in his final years experienced a kind of late-life global visibility that nothing in his rural Nepali upbringing could have anticipated.