Chapter Four - The New Monarchy: The Early Years

Summary

“They say that a kingdom is like a pyramid: the king on top and the people below. But in this country, it’s upside down,” His Majesty told us. “That’s why I sometimes have this pain around here.” He pointed to his necking shoulders and his normally scholar serious face broke into a broad smile.

Denis D. Gray, 1987

Inception and Development in the 1950s

The new monarchy of Thailand began to take shape in the second half of the 1950s. By the first half of the 1990s, it was fully established, as we have seen. Black May, or Bloody May, a common name for the 17–20 May 1992 popular protest in Bangkok against the government of General Suchinda Kraprayoon and the military crackdown that followed, showed King Bhumibol at the peak of his reserved powers.

He used his barami to the fullest, to the point where the king’s “wish became like a command”. This chapter will examine how this new monarchy was established in Thailand.

As Anand, the former prime minister, argued, one of the most significant identities of King Bhumibol was as a kasat nak phatthana or developer king. By 1996, according to Anand, his development projects (khrongkan phra rathca damri or royally initiated projects [RIPs]) numbered almost 2,000.

Eight years later, they had increased to over 3,000. An official statement claimed that almost 8 million people, or one in every ten Thai citizens, had benefited from them.

The history of RIPs goes back to 1951, when the young king returned from Switzerland to reside permanently in Thailand. Yet in a sense, they also had their roots in boyhood lessons inculcated by his mother, Princess Srinagarindra, who in addition to Buddhist precepts, taught her children that they had a duty to help those who were less fortunate.

The permanent impact of this early instruction was of the sources of the RIPs, their ever-expanding scope and longevity. When Bhumibol returned to Thailand in 1951 at age twenty-three, he was accompanied by his fiancée M.R. Sirikit Kittiyakorn, who would become a lifelong collaborator in RIPs, tirelessly promoting crafts and economic solutions for the nation’s underprivileged. Yet for all her awareness of the need for social progress, Sirikit was a product of the aristocracy, as a grandniece of Chulalongkorn and therefore a distant cousin of her fiancé Bhumibol.