Thailand<\/a>‘s longest-reigning monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died in 2016.<\/p>\nKing 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
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\u00a0forbidding insult of the monarchy.<\/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
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
News.Az<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Queen Sirikit, the mother of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn, has died aged 93,\u00a0News.Az reports, citing\u00a0BBC. She passed away “peacefully”…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,11392,122,124,123,9202],"class_list":["post-15997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queen-sirikit","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-thailand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}