BangkokPost/AFP-Oct 26
The year-long funeral ceremony of Thailand’s former queen Sirikit started Sunday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Former queen Sirikit, the mother of the current King Vajiralongkorn and wife of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late Friday at the age of 93. Black and white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertising billboards, on TVs in supermarkets and hotel lobbies, and as pop-up notices on Thai banking apps. The former queen’s body is due late on Sunday afternoon to make the short trip from Chulalongkorn Hospital to the seat of the Thai royalty, where she will lie in state for one year before cremation. Television newscasters are wearing black and media websites have turned monochrome, while citizens have been asked to dress in muted colors and curtail celebratory public events for 90 days. About half of the people in a supermarket and on a shopping street in central Bangkok were wearing the traditional Thai mourning colors of black or white, an AFP journalist saw. Hundreds of black-clad mourners also filed into the Grand Palace from Sunday morning, even before Sirikit’s remains arrived, paying tribute to ornate portraits depicting her. Throughout her 66-year marriage to King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Queen Sirikit carved a dual reputation as a glittering fashionista and the nation’s caring mother figure. She was referred to as the “Mother of the Nation” and her birthday was designated the country’s Mother’s Day. Read more at: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/3126605/yearlong-funeral-starts-for-thailands-former-queen-sirikit?tbref=hp.
