BANGKOK\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Thailand\u2019s Queen Mother Sirikit, who supervised royal projects to help the rural poor, preserve traditional craft-making and protect the environment, died Friday. She was 93.<\/p>\n
The Royal Household Bureau said she died in a hospital in Bangkok after developing a blood infection last week. Since suffering a stroke in 2012, she was largely absent from public life due to declining health. Her husband, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, died in October 2016.<\/p>\n
The bureau\u2019s statement said King Maha Vajiralongkorn, Sirikit\u2019s son, directed that she be given a funeral with the highest honors, and he instructed members of the royal family and royal servants to observe a one-year period of mourning. <\/p>\n
Mourners gathered outside Chulalongkorn Hospital on Saturday morning after hearing the news.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is yet again another great loss for the whole nation. I heard about it at 4 a.m. I felt like fainting. The whole world seemed like it had stopped,\u201d said 67-year-old Maneerat Laowalert.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said Saturday that Sirikit\u2019s passing was \u201ca great loss for the country.\u201d He said the national flag will fly at half-staff at all government agencies for 30 days, and civil servants will observe mourning for one year.<\/p>\n
Although overshadowed by her late husband and her son, Sirikit was beloved and influential in her own right. Her portrait was displayed in homes, offices and public spaces across Thailand, and her Aug. 12 birthday was celebrated as Mother\u2019s Day. Her activities included helping Cambodian refugees and saving some of the country\u2019s once-lush forests from destruction.<\/p>\n
The Thai monarchy traditionally has avoided playing an open role in politics, but in recent decades of political upheaval, marked by two military takeovers and several rounds of bloody street protests, speculation grew about Sirikit\u2019s views and her influence behind the scenes. When she attended the 2008 funeral of a protester killed during a clash with police, many saw it as her taking a side in the political schism.<\/p>\n
Early life<\/p>\n
Sirikit Kitiyakara was born into a rich, aristocratic family in Bangkok on Aug. 12, 1932, the year absolute monarchy was replaced by a constitutional system. Both of her parents were related to earlier kings of the current Chakri dynasty.<\/p>\n
She attended schools in wartime Bangkok, the target of Allied air raids, and after World War II moved with her diplomat father to France, where he served as ambassador.<\/p>\n
At 16, she met Thailand\u2019s newly crowned king in Paris, where she was studying music and languages. Their friendship blossomed after Bhumibol suffered a near-fatal car accident and she moved to Switzerland, where he was studying, to help care for him. The king courted her with poetry and composed a waltz titled, \u201cI Dream of You.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pair married in 1950, and at a coronation ceremony later that year both vowed to \u201creign with righteousness for the benefit and happiness of the Siamese [Thai] people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The couple had four children: King Maha Vajiralongkorn and Princesses Ubolratana, Sirindhorn and Chulabhorn.<\/p>\n
During their early married life, the Thai royals crisscrossed the world as goodwill ambassadors and forged personal ties with world leaders.<\/p>\n
A turn to Thailand\u2019s rural areas<\/p>\n
But by the early 1970s, the king and queen turned most of their energies to Thailand\u2019s domestic problems, including rural poverty, opium addiction in hill tribes and a communist insurgency.<\/p>\n
The queen, an impeccable dresser and avid shopper, also relished climbing hills and visiting simple villages where older women would call her \u201cdaughter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thousands raised their problems to her, including marital squabbles and serious diseases, and the queen and her assistants took up many personally.<\/p>\n
While some in Bangkok gossiped about her involvement in palace intrigues and her lavish lifestyle, her popularity in the countryside endured.<\/p>\n
\u201cMisunderstandings arise between people in rural areas and the rich, so-called civilized people in Bangkok. People in rural Thailand say they are neglected, and we try to fill that gap by staying with them in remote areas,\u201d she said in an interview with the Associated Press in 1979.<\/p>\n
Royal development projects were set up across Thailand, some of them initiated and directly supervised by the queen.<\/p>\n
In 1976, Sirikit launched a foundation to promote Thai traditional handcrafts. The SUPPORT foundation has trained thousands of villagers in crafts including silk weaving, jewelry making, painting and ceramics.<\/p>\n
She also set up wildlife breeding centers, \u201copen zoos\u201d and hatcheries to save endangered sea turtles. Her Forest Loves Water and Little House in the Forest projects sought to demonstrate the economic gains of preserving forest cover and water sources.<\/p>\n
While royalty elsewhere had only ceremonial or symbolic roles, Sirikit believed the monarchy was a vital institution in Thailand.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are some in the universities who think the monarchy is obsolete. But I think Thailand needs an understanding monarch,\u201d she said in the 1979 interview. \u201cAt the call, \u2018The king is coming,\u2019 thousands will gather.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mere word \u2018king\u2019 has something magic in it. It is wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gray, Saksornchai and Ji write for the Associated Press. Gray served as longtime Bangkok bureau chief before his retirement. AP writer David Rising in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BANGKOK\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Thailand\u2019s Queen Mother Sirikit, who supervised royal projects to help the rural poor, preserve traditional craft-making and protect…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[11743,11740,9430,9433,11741,11739,11742,11432,9,24,63,1232,666,11615,122,124,123,11738,11395,9202,7152],"class_list":["post-16542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-ambassador","tag-aug","tag-bangkok","tag-day","tag-domestic-problem","tag-early-king","tag-hill-tribe","tag-king-maha-vajiralongkorn","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-people","tag-queen","tag-queen-mother-sirikit","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-sirikit","tag-thai-monarchy","tag-thailand","tag-thousand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16542","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=16542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}