Bhumibol Adulyadej

Bhumibol reigned for seventy years, held no formal power, and twice ended a political crisis by summoning the men responsible to kneel in front of him on television. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was studying medicine, was educated in Switzerland, and came to the throne in 1946 at eighteen when his elder brother Ananda was found shot dead in the palace, a death never satisfactorily explained and unsafe to discuss in Thailand. He was crowned in 1950 and spent the first decade as a ceremonial figure under Field Marshal Phibun. From the late 1950s Sarit Thanarat rebuilt the monarchy's public standing as a source of legitimacy for military rule, and Bhumibol toured the provinces constantly, initiating several thousand rural development projects in irrigation, soil and crop substitution that gave the throne a presence in ordinary life no Thai government had. He intervened decisively in October 1973, when he opened the palace to fleeing students and the dictatorship collapsed, and in May 1992, when he had the general and the protest leader brought before him and the shooting stopped. He said nothing comparable in 1976, when a massacre at Thammasat University was carried out by royalist groups. Lese-majeste law made public assessment of him impossible in his own country. He played jazz clarinet, composed, and was reportedly the wealthiest monarch in the world. Mourning after his death lasted a year. He lost the sight of one eye in a car accident in Switzerland in 1948, before his coronation. He held a patent for a rainmaking technique and another for a water aerator. He was the world's longest-reigning living monarch at his death. Nineteen coups or attempted coups took place during his reign, and he survived all of them on the throne, which is itself the most telling fact about the office he built.

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