{"id":238396,"date":"2025-10-25T03:46:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T03:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/238396\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T03:46:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T03:46:08","slug":"thailands-former-queen-sirikit-dies-aged-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/238396\/","title":{"rendered":"Thailand’s former queen Sirikit dies aged 93"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ReutersReuters<\/p>\n

Queen Sirikit, the mother of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn, has died aged 93. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Sirikit had “suffered several illnesses” while in hospital since 2019, including a blood infection this month, it added.<\/p>\n

For more than six decades, Queen Sirikit was married to Thailand’s longest-reigning monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died in 2016.<\/p>\n

King Vajiralongkorn has ordered the Thai Royal Household Bureau to organise a royal funeral, the statement added.<\/p>\n

Queen Sirikit’s body will lie in state at the Grand Palace’s Dusit Thorne Hall in Bangkok, according to the palace.<\/p>\n

Thai royal family members will also observe a year of mourning.<\/p>\n

Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has cancelled his trip to a South East Asian Nations (Asean) summit in Malaysia due to Queen Sirikit’s death.<\/p>\n

Queen Sirikit married the late Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej in 1950<\/p>\n

As a young queen, Sirikit was regarded as a fashion icon<\/p>\n

Queen Sirikit met her future husband, King Bhumibol, while studying music in Paris, where her father was stationed as Thai ambassador to France.<\/p>\n

“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. <\/p>\n

“Because he said he would arrive at four o’clock in the afternoon. He arrived at seven o’clock, kept me standing there, practising curtsy and curtsy,” she said.<\/p>\n

The couple married on 28 April 1950, just a week before King Bhumibol was crowned in Bangkok.<\/p>\n

As a young couple in the 1960s, Queen Sirikit and King Bhumibol travelled around the world, meeting US president Dwight Eisenhower, the late Queen Elizabeth II – as well as Elvis Presley.<\/p>\n

During that decade, she frequently made international best dressed lists.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“That is why we do not have much private life, because we are considered father and mother of the nation.”<\/p>\n

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

In 2008, she attended the funeral of an anti-government protester killed in violent clashes with police. <\/p>\n

Queen Sirikit suffered a stroke in 2012, after which she was rarely seen in public.<\/p>\n

She is survived by her son and three daughters. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reuters Queen Sirikit, the mother of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn, has died aged 93. She passed away “peacefully” in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238397,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-238396","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}