Year-long Funeral Starts for Thailand’s Former Queen Sirikit

AFP/APP

Bangkok: The year-long funeral ceremony of Thailand’s former queen Sirikit began Sunday, with grieving royalists gathering to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace.

Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and honored with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits displayed in public spaces and private homes nationwide.

Former queen Sirikit, the mother of the current King Vajiralongkorn and wife of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late Friday at the age of 93.

Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being displayed on towering digital billboards, TV screens in supermarkets and hotel lobbies, and as pop-up notices on Thai banking apps.

Tanaburdee Srimuang, 24, has kept a vigil outside the Grand Palace since confirmation of Sirikit’s death in the early hours of Saturday.

“I am not tired,” he told AFP. “I am happy to be here for her for the last time, to be part of her send-off on this historic day.”

The former queen’s body is due late Sunday afternoon to make the short trip from Chulalongkorn Hospital to the seat of the Thai monarchy, where she will lie in state for one year before cremation.

Television newscasters are wearing black, and media websites have turned monochrome, while citizens have been asked to dress in muted colors and refrain from celebratory public events for 90 days.

About half of the people in a supermarket and on a shopping street in central Bangkok were seen wearing traditional Thai mourning colors of black or white, an AFP journalist reported.

K-pop supergroup Blackpink went ahead with sold-out Saturday and Sunday shows at Bangkok’s 50,000-seat Rajamangala National Stadium, but attendees were asked “to wear black attire as a mark of mourning.”

‘Mother of the Nation’

Hundreds of black-clad mourners also filed into the Grand Palace from Sunday morning, even before Sirikit’s remains arrived, paying tribute to ornate portraits depicting her.

“I knew today would come one day, but now it has come I am sad — very sad,” said 52-year-old insurance worker Taksina Puttisan. “Her kindness toward Thais will be in our minds forever.”

Throughout her 66-year marriage to King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Sirikit built a dual reputation as a glittering fashion icon and the nation’s caring mother figure.

Some Western media once compared Sirikit favorably to former U.S. First Lady Jackie Kennedy, featuring her prominently in rapturous coverage on glossy magazine covers.

Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul delayed his departure to Malaysia on Saturday for a summit of ASEAN leaders to sign a peace deal with Cambodia, witnessed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

He later traveled briefly to endorse the pact, signed after cross-border clashes in July killed more than 40 people and displaced around 300,000.

“I send my condolences to the Great People of Thailand,” Trump said on social media, en route to Malaysia where the pact was signed Sunday afternoon.

The lengthy reign of Sirikit’s husband, from 1946 until 2016, spanned eras from World War II to Trump’s first election victory.

Although Bhumibol’s son inherited the throne nearly nine years ago, many Thais still revere the late king as the nation’s most steadfast figurehead — and Sirikit as his devoted companion.

In recent years, she withdrew from public life, her privacy protected by strict lese majeste laws that restrict reporting on the royal family.

According to a palace statement, Sirikit had “suffered several illnesses” during her hospitalization since 2019, including a blood infection earlier this month.

In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, she mingled with U.S. presidents and global celebrities such as Elvis Presley, while at home touring remote Thai villages to meet rural communities.

Revered as the “Mother of the Nation,” her birthday was officially designated as Thailand’s Mother’s Day.