Bhumibol Adulyadej

Bhumibol Adulyadej: The Jazz King Who Outlasted Nineteen Coups

In May 1992, with Bangkok's streets bloodied and soldiers shooting demonstrators, the King of Thailand summoned the general who had ordered the crackdown and the opposition leader who had defied him. Both men were brought before him on national television and both, in accordance with protocol, approached him on their knees. General Suchinda Kraprayoon resigned. Nothing in the Thai constitution gave Bhumibol the authority to do that. He did it anyway, and the country let him.

Born in Massachusetts

He was born at Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 5 December 1927, the youngest son of Prince Mahidol Adulyadej, who was studying public health at Harvard. The family returned to Thailand in 1928; his father died of kidney failure the following year, and in 1933 his mother took the children to Switzerland. He grew up at the École nouvelle de la Suisse romande in Lausanne, took a baccalauréat in French literature, Latin and Greek, and began science at the University of Lausanne before switching to law and political science — because by then the science degree had become irrelevant to his life.

A Throne and an Eye

On 9 June 1946 his elder brother, King Ananda Mahidol, was found shot dead in the palace. The circumstances have never been satisfactorily explained; three palace aides were executed for regicide in 1955. Bhumibol, eighteen, was suddenly king. Two years later, on 4 October 1948, driving a Fiat Topolino near Lausanne, he hit a truck and was left with a back injury, partial facial paralysis and the permanent loss of sight in his right eye. Sirikit Kitiyakara, daughter of the Thai ambassador in Paris, visited him repeatedly in hospital. They married on 28 April 1950, a week before his coronation at the Grand Palace on 5 May, where he swore to reign with righteousness for the benefit and happiness of the Siamese people.

The Musician

He had fallen for jazz in 1942 and never got over it. He played saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, guitar and piano, and began composing in 1946 with "Candlelight Blues," "Love at Sundown" and "Falling Rain" — forty-nine pieces in all. He founded bands, broadcast weekly from a palace radio station, and played with Benny Goodman in 1956 and again in New York in 1960, and with Stan Getz, Lionel Hampton and Benny Carter. Vienna's University of Music and Performing Arts made him an honorary member in 1964. These were not courtesy sessions arranged for a monarch; Goodman did not suffer amateurs.

The Inventor

Over seventy years he initiated more than 4,000 development projects, and a striking number of them were his own engineering. He patented the Chai Pattana wastewater aerator in 1993 and it took a gold medal at Brussels Eureka 2000. He patented artificial rainmaking methods — the "sandwich" technique in 1999, the "supersandwich" in 2003. He pushed vetiver grass for soil rehabilitation, drove the Khun Dan Prakanchon and Pa Sak Jolasid dams and the Khlong Lat Pho flood diversion, and worked on rice germplasm collection seriously enough to receive the first Borlaug Medallion in 2007. In 2014 the United Nations designated his birthday World Soil Day. His "sufficiency economy" doctrine — localised, restrained, sceptical of export-led growth — was written into the constitution after the 2006 coup.

He also sailed. He built an OK-class dinghy, sailed it sixty nautical miles from Hua Hin to Sattahip in seventeen hours on 19 April 1966, designed racing boats in the International Enterprise, OK and Moth classes, and won a gold medal at the 1967 Southeast Asian Peninsular Games with his daughter Ubolratana — racing, it should be said, without binocular depth perception.

The Political King

His interventions were selective and consequential. In 1957 he advised Field Marshal Phibunsongkhram to resign and, after Sarit Thanarat's coup, imposed martial law and named Sarit Military Defender of the Capital. In October 1973 he announced Thanom Kittikachorn's resignation and departure from the country after police killings of students. In 1976 he had courted the Red Gaurs and Village Scouts, backed the coup that followed the Thammasat University massacre and chose Thanin Kraivichien as premier, while remaining silent about the massacre itself. He refused to endorse the coup attempts of April 1981 and September 1985, and government-loyal forces prevailed both times. Then came May 1992.

In April 2006 he called the boycotted elections undemocratic — "It is, pardon me, a mess. It is irrational" — and in May addressed senior judges directly; the Constitutional Court invalidated the elections on 8 May. When the army removed Thaksin Shinawatra that September, analysts widely read the King as having implicitly endorsed it, and the critic Sulak Sivaraksa said flatly that without his involvement the coup would have been impossible. In 2014 he acknowledged General Prayut Chan-o-cha's coup and then formally appointed him to govern. The scholars Duncan McCargo and Federico Ferrara described the mechanism as a "network monarchy": influence exercised indirectly through proxies, above all Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanonda, and through the courts.

The Silence Around Him

Thailand's lèse-majesté law carries three to fifteen years' imprisonment and was tightened after 1976. In his 2005 birthday speech Bhumibol invited criticism: "Actually, I must also be criticised. I am not afraid if the criticism concerns what I do wrong, because then I know" — adding that to insist the king could not be wrong was to refuse to treat him as a human being. Prosecutions then rose from five or six a year to 478 in 2010. Paul Handley's critical biography *The King Never Smiles* was banned in January 2006. Forbes put his fortune at some $30 billion in 2010 and listed him as the world's richest royal from 2008 to 2013, a figure the Thai government disputed on the ground that it conflated the institutional holdings of the Crown Property Bureau with personal wealth.

Why Bhumibol Is Called a Genius

Of all modern monarchs he has the strongest documented claim, and it still needs qualifying twice. The technical output is real and externally validated: patents that were granted, an aerator that won gold at an open international invention fair, the first Borlaug Medallion, a UN observance named for his soil work, forty-nine compositions performed with musicians of the first rank, racing dinghies of his own design sailed to a regional gold with one eye. Very few people produce that range in a lifetime with nothing else to do; he produced it while being a head of state.

The political claim is separate and larger. For seventy years he extracted enormous authority from an office that formally held almost none, and in 1992 two men commanding the army and the streets knelt to him on television because he asked.

The honest counter-case is that none of the acclaim can be taken at face value. Criticising him was a crime punishable by up to fifteen years, so no candid public assessment was possible in Thailand while he lived, and the reverence was legally protected as well as freely given. Scholars who studied the reign closely describe influence exercised through proxies and courts rather than open constitutional means. He refused two coups and effectively blessed others, including one that followed a massacre he never condemned. The fairest description is not simply inventive genius but something rarer and more uncomfortable: a man of genuine technical curiosity who converted unassailable moral authority into political power, and spent it unevenly.

Legacy

After a decade largely spent in hospital he died at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok at 15:52 on 13 October 2016, aged 88, having reigned 70 years and 126 days — the longest of any Thai monarch and the longest on record for any independent Asian sovereign. The government declared a year of mourning; he was cremated over five days ending 26 October 2017. His son succeeded him as Rama X, and analysts noted immediately that the new king had not attracted the same reverence — which was the point everyone in Thailand understood and almost nobody could say aloud.

Achievements

• King of Thailand (1946–2016)
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour — 1960
• collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece — 2006
• Order of the Crown of the Realm — 1963
• Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Saint Olav‎ — 1960
• Educated at University of Lausanne and Mater Dei School