Pavin Chachavalpongpun - Love and Death of King Ananda Mahidol of Thailand

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History is chock full of small episodes obscured by greater events, buried by people who find them inconvenient, or just left on the floor by historians sharp-knifed editors, which illuminate, color, and explain those greater events. This is one of those.

Ananda Mahidol , or Rama VIII, lived only a short time, very little of it in his own kingdom, and left behind a very small footprinthis birth, a number of small black-and-white photographs of his youth and teen years, and then his sudden, violent, never-explained death at 20.

That life spanned two very different cultures, the two theaters of World War II, and accounts of ithe was after all a king from when he was 9 years oldshould be rich with detail, about his high-born father who died young, his commoner-born mother, and his royal brother and sister.

Given that after his death his younger brother Bhumibol Adulyadej reigned with huge success for 70 years, it is normal that Ananda would be less remembered. Yet his story, the details of it, almost disappears between his father Prince Mahidol Adulyadej, who died when Ananda was just four, and his brother Bhumibol .

That is by purpose. The Thai royal family and royal court have forever sought to closely control the histories of its members, its kings and queens, extolling and mythologizing those whose lives serve the bigger needs of the legitimacy and power of hereditary monarchy, and debasing others who either mar the glorious family history or serve as foils for its greatest members.

Ananda, in his short innocent life, fits into neither pocket. And anyone trying to force him into one would run into obstacles.

However there are, unlike with previous monarchs of Siam, indisputable records of his life outside the control of palace archivists. Those come in the form of foreign government reports, media articles, photographs, and newsreel footage, showing a happy boy growing up through the war in Lausanne , Switzerland, and then depicting his sudden, mysterious death.

Because of this, the palace has chosen to do nothing at all with his story. It could be both inspiring and tragic. But telling it raises far too many deeply troubling questions of truth, law, and legitimacy, casting great shadows over his mother, his brother, the princes of the royal court, and the politicians and generals who led Thailand for the second half of the twentieth century.

Yet it is a good story, one worth telling, for how it deeply figured in the modern history of his country, from the 1932 revolution, which overthrew the absolute monarchy through his brother King Bhumibols reign from 1946 to 2016.

And it is worth telling because it is just the kind of inspiring, tragic, and intrigue-filled tale that lovers of monarchy and stories of kings and queens adore. Few, or course, are unaware of the popular books, musical, and filmThe King and Iabout the fantasized love story of the English governess Anna Leonowens and Anandas great-grandfather King Mongkut , or Rama IV.

Telling Anandas tale, specifically of his death, was tried once, by South African writer Rayne Kruger , in his 1964 book The DevilsDiscus: An Inquiry into the Death of Ananda, King of Siam. Kruger was invited to Thailand by a senior prince seeking to right the blood-stained wrongs that multiplied and mutated through politics after Anandas death. Krugers book was of course banned in the country, as too many people had too much to lose by revisiting the tragedy of 18 years earlier.

And I looked at it, though without great detail, in my own biography of Bhumibol published in 2006, The King Never Smiles also banned. Even in the twenty-first century, the royal edifice and Thai government do not want outsiders writing the histories of their kings. Yet, they still dont truly endeavor to do it themselves. And they wield the harsh law of lse-majest, banning critical comment on the royal family, to prevent anyone unauthorized from doing so.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun, though, is no outsider. He is Thai, a former diplomat with exposure to the royal family and royal culture, which he was raised to venerate but later found reason to delve further behind the official picture.