Thailand’s former queen Sirikit dies aged 93

Queen Sirikit, the mother of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn, has died aged 93.

She passed away “peacefully” in a Bangkok hospital at 21:21 local time (14:21 GMT) on Friday, according to the Thai Royal Household Bureau.

Sirikit had “suffered several illnesses” while in hospital since 2019, including a blood infection this month, it added.

For more than six decades, Queen Sirikit was married to Thailand’s longest-reigning monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died in 2016. In their globe-trotting heyday, she was seen as a style icon.

King Vajiralongkorn has ordered that the Thai Royal Household Bureau organize a royal funeral, the statement added.

Queen Sirikit’s body will lie in state at the Grand Palace’s Dusit Thorne Hall in Bangkok, it said.

Thai royal family members will also observe a year of mourning.

Queen Sirikit met her future husband, King Bhumibol, while studying music in Paris, where her father was at the time stationed as Thai ambassador to France.

“It was hate at first sight,” she said in a 1980 BBC documentary about the Thai monarchy, Soul of a Nation, adding that he had arrived late to their first meeting.

“He said he would arrive at four o’clock in the afternoon. He arrived at seven o’clock, caught me standing there, practicing curtsy and curtsy,” she said.

The couple married on April 28, 1950, just a week before King Bhumibol was crowned in Bangkok.

As a young couple in the 1960s, Queen Sirikit and King Bhumibol traveled around the world, meeting famous faces including US President Dwight Eisenhower, the late Queen Elizabeth II and Elvis Presley.

During that decade, she frequently made international best-dressed lists.

In the rare 1980 interview with the BBC, she also described the relationship between the monarchy and people in Thailand, which continues to observe strict lese-majeste laws forbidding insult of the monarchy.

She said: “Kings and queens of Thailand have always been in close contact with the people and they usually regard the king as the father of the nation.

“That is why we will not have much private life, because we are considered father and mother of the nation.”

She was seen as a key maternal figure for the country, with her birthday, August 12, marked as Mother’s Day since 1976.

In 2008, she attended the funeral of an anti-government protester killed in violent clashes with the police.

Queen Sirikit suffered a stroke in 2012, after which she was rarely seen in public.

She is survived by her son and three daughters.