Ananda Mahidol

Ananda Mahidol was king of Siam from the age of nine and was found shot dead in his bed at twenty, in a case that has never been solved and cannot be publicly discussed in Thailand. He was born in Heidelberg, where his father was studying medicine, and was living in Lausanne as a schoolboy when his uncle Prajadhipok abdicated in 1935 after the revolution that ended the absolute monarchy; the People's Party chose him precisely because he was a child and abroad. He stayed in Switzerland through the war and returned to Bangkok in December 1945, at a moment when Pridi Banomyong's civilian government was trying to establish itself and the country's alignment after the Japanese occupation was unsettled. On the morning of 9 June 1946 he was found in his bedroom in the Boromphiman Throne Hall with a bullet wound in the forehead and a pistol beside him. Accident, suicide and assassination were all proposed within days. The political use of the death was immediate: Pridi was accused of complicity, resigned within weeks, and was driven from the country altogether after the coup of 1947, which returned Phibunsongkhram to power. Three royal pages were tried over several years and executed in 1955 in proceedings that are widely regarded as fabricated. His younger brother Bhumibol Adulyadej, who was in the palace that morning, succeeded him and reigned for seventy years. Lese-majeste law makes the subject effectively closed inside Thailand, and books examining it have been banned. The gap between how consequential the death was and how little can be said about it is unusual even among unsolved political killings.

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