Hassanal Bolkiah
Hassanal Bolkiah has been sultan of Brunei since October 1967, when his father abdicated in his favour at twenty-one to keep the British from pushing the state into Malaysia, the twenty-ninth of a line that has ruled the north-west corner of Borneo since the fourteenth century, the longest-reigning monarch alive since the death of Elizabeth II. For most of his reign he was the richest. The Seria oilfield and the offshore gas that Shell found in 1929 and 1963 pay for a country of four hundred and fifty thousand people with no income tax, free schooling, free medicine, subsidised rice, housing and pilgrimages, a palace of seventeen hundred and eighty-eight rooms, the largest residence in the world, and a collection of some seven thousand cars. He has been prime minister since independence from Britain on 1 January 1984. He has been finance minister and defence minister and foreign minister for most of the years since. He rules under a state of emergency declared by his father in 1962 after a revolt and renewed every two years since. The parliament has been appointed when it has sat, the parties have members in the dozens, and the Malay Islamic monarchy is the doctrine. He was born in Brunei Town in 1946, was educated at Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur and at Sandhurst, which he left in 1967 to be crowned. He has three wives, two of them divorced, and twelve children, with the crown prince Al-Muhtadee Billah, born in 1974, the heir. The reign's episodes have been the Amedeo affair of 1998-2000, in which his brother Jefri, the finance minister, was found to have spent fifteen billion dollars of the state's money on the Dorchester hotel, a yacht called Tits and the Asprey jewellers, and was sued in London and stripped. There was the sharia penal code introduced in 2014 and extended in April 2019 to stoning for adultery and sodomy and amputation for theft, which brought a boycott of his hotels led by George Clooney and a moratorium on the death penalty announced a month later. There is the oil that peaked in 1979 and is running down, and the Chinese petrochemical plant at Pulau Muara Besar that is the replacement. There is the South China Sea claim that Brunei makes on paper and never presses. At eighty he has said nothing of retiring. The golden jubilee of 2017 and the diamond of 2027, if he reaches it, are the country's calendar.
- Lived: 1946 CE – ?
- Nationality: Bruneian
- Roles: monarch, sultan
