His brother’s mysterious death launched Thai King Bhumibol’s 70-year reign

TODAY marks the 70th anniversary of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s ascension to the throne. While it will be a time of celebration, on June 9, 1946, when the title passed to him, it was anything but.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej during his coronation ceremony at the Royal Palace in Bangkok, Thailand in 1950.

TODAY Thailand celebrates the 70th anniversary of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s ascension to the throne. While it will be a time of great celebration, back on June 9, 1946, when the title passed to him, it was anything but celebratory.

On that same day the reigning king Ananda Mahidol, the older brother of Bhumibol, had been found dead in his bedroom with a single gunshot wound to his head. Initially thought to be suicide, people soon began to suspect murder. Although three people were later executed, questions still remain about who pulled the trigger.

Ananda was born in Heidelberg in Germany in 1925 while his father, Prince Mahidol Adulyadej, brother of King Prajadhipok, was having treatment for a kidney ailment. After Ananda’s birth the family returned to the US where Ananda’s father was completing studies in medicine.

A 1927 royal decree elevated Ananda and his parents to a higher rank, suggesting that the childless Prajadhipok was anointing his brother as a possible successor, but when Ananda’s father died in 1929, Ananda became a likely heir.

An illustration of Ananda Mahidol who became the boy King of Siam, after his uncle abdicated in 1935.

In 1932, a group of students, collaborating with the military, staged a bloodless coup while King Prajadhipok was away from the capital. The students imposed a constitution, creating a state council and a national assembly and making the king a constitutional monarch. Prajadhipok remained neutral during the struggle between the new government and the old royalist ruling elite, which was won by the assembly. But, worried by the increasingly dictatorial assembly, the king demanded the constitution be amended to make the assembly an elected body or he would abdicate.

In 1934, the king left on a planned tour of Europe but stopped in England for medical treatment and in 1935 he abdicated. The nine-year-old Ananda became king of what was then known as Siam. At the time he was studying in Switzerland and regents were appointed. Ananda made a brief visit to the country when he was 13 but stayed in Europe until the end of World War II.

King Ananda Mahidol of Siam with his mother Princess Sangwala, before he was found dead at his palace in Bangkok on June 9, 1946.

In 1938, Field Marshal Plaek Pibulsongkhram came to power as prime minister, ruling as a dictator. In 1939, he changed the country’s name to Thailand and in 1942 sided with Japan against the Allies. Ananda refused to sign the declaration of war against the Allies.

Pibulsongkhram was ousted in 1945 and when the war ended, the king, now a law graduate, returned in triumph. Attempts to prosecute Pibulsongkhram for war crimes failed and Ananda withdrew from public life.

The handsome young king was popular with his subjects and showed himself to have the makings of a good king, particularly his embracing of democracy and his personal intervention in heading off tensions between Thais and ethnic Chinese in Bangkok.

Lord Louis Mountbatten described him as a “pathetic and lonely figure” who was chronically nervous in public. There is other evidence to suggest he was often depressed after taking on the burden of the crown. But when he was found dead on June 9, 1946, despite looking like a suicide, a subsequent medical examination ruled that it was impossible for Ananda to have killed himself. Evidence at the scene was tampered with by servants. Investigations into the king’s demise were also deliberately hampered by people loyal to Pibulsongkhram, who used this period of instability in the wake of the king’s death to orchestrate a coup that returned him to power in 1948.

King Bhumibol in Adelaide in 1962.

Despite Mountbatten’s hasty conclusion, a letter written to King George VI gave no evidence to suggest that Bhumibol pulled the trigger. He and his brother were very close and it is impossible to imagine that Bhumibol would have taken such drastic action to secure a job that weighed so heavily on his beloved brother.

Bhumibol was named Ananda’s successor but wielded little actual power and soon after the murder left for Switzerland to complete his studies. He would stay there for four years, returning in 1950 when he was officially crowned king. King Ananda’s former secretary and two palace servants were arrested for the murder but the courts were reluctant to put them on trial, believing there was not enough evidence to convict. The notoriously corrupt General Phao, director of Thailand’s police force, forced the matter in 1954, pushing through convictions and a sentence of death for the three suspects. They were executed in 1955.

Originally published as His brother’s mysterious death launched Thai King Bhumibol’s 70-year reign