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Queen Sirikit, the mother of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn, has died aged 93.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She passed away “peacefully” in a Bangkok hospital at 21:21 local time (14:21 GMT) on Friday, according to the Thai Royal Household Bureau.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sirikit had “suffered several illnesses” while in hospital since 2019, including a blood infection this month, it added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For more than six decades, Queen Sirikit was married to Thailand’s longest-reigning monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
King Vajiralongkorn has ordered the Thai Royal Household Bureau to organise a royal funeral, the statement added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Queen Sirikit’s body will lie in state at the Grand Palace’s Dusit Thorne Hall in Bangkok, according to the palace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thai royal family members will also observe a year of mourning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Queen Sirikit met her future husband, King Bhumibol, while studying music in Paris, where her father was stationed as Thai ambassador to France.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It was hate at first sight,” she said in a 1980 BBC documentary about the Thai monarchy, Soul of a Nation, adding that he had arrived late to their first meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Because he said he would arrive at four o’clock in the afternoon. He arrived at seven o’clock, kept me standing there, practising curtsy and curtsy,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The couple married on 28 April 1950, just a week before King Bhumibol was crowned in Bangkok.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a young couple in the 1960s, Queen Sirikit and King Bhumibol travelled around the world, meeting US president Dwight Eisenhower, the late Queen Elizabeth II – as well as Elvis Presley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During that decade, she frequently made international best dressed lists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n