As a single shot shattered the stillness of Bangkok's Borompimarn Palace on a steamy June morning in 1946, the land some still called Siam changed forever. Twenty-year-old King Ananda was dead. The manner of his passing by accident, suicide or murder endures as Thailand's deepest mystery. The pistol smoke barely had time to clear before the mantle of kingship passed to Ananda's 18-year-old brother, Bhumibol Adulyadej. Some, including a new magazine in Asia named TIME, pondered whether the "gangling, spectacled" teenager could survive the deadly intrigues of a fabled and faraway Oriental land.
The odds were...
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