Word: kingships
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...Craft of Kingship. Rarer and more precious than rubies in Southeast Asia, however, is political stability and its sine qua non: a sense of belonging to a nation. The Thais have both. Though various ruling officers have come and gone since a 1932 coup gently displaced the King as absolute ruler, Kings and soldiers have combined, in a typical Thai equilibrium of accommodation, to provide a smooth chain linkage of government. The Thai sense of nationhood is partly the result of never having felt the trauma of colonial conquest. Even more, it resides in the charisma of the throne, reinforced...
...when kings have gone out of style and the craft of kingship is all but forgotten, it is the good fortune of Thailand-and of the free world-that the present occupant of the nine-tiered umbrella throne, ninth monarch of the 184-year-old Chakri dynasty, not only takes the business of being a king seriously but has taken it upon himself to mold his emerging nation's character. In the musical five-tone Thai tongue, his full name rings like the roll of monsoon thunder...
...prepare the way for an orderly transition after his death, Idris has been grooming his nephew, Crown Prince Hassan Rida, and at the same time altering and liberalizing the character of Libya's kingship. He is retiring more and more to his half a dozen domed and crenelated palaces scattered around the country, leaving day-to-day government to his able and popular Prime Minister, Hussein Mazik, and encouraging talk of a constitutional monarchy and even a republic after he is gone. Whatever Libya becomes, the chances are that its wealth will continue to grow: it has hardly begun...
...King Ibn Saud's deathbed in 1953, Prince Feisal of Saudi Arabia swore a mighty oath on the Koran that he would never usurp the kingship from the half brother who became King Saud. Last week, not for the first time, Saud, 63, kept his crown only because Feisal proved a man of his word. But the nominal kingship and his allowance-which was halved to a mere $20 million a year -were all that Saud retained. The sixyear power struggle between the two brothers culminated in a bloodless palace coup in which Saud was stripped of every power...
Wayward Boy-King. However such opinions may strike the West, they convince Sihanouk's own people. Of all the rulers of Southeast Asia, he is probably the most popular inside his own country, partly because he has an aura both of divine kingship and grass-roots politics. Sihanouk succeeded to the ancient Khmer throne in 1941 at 19, when the French were still firmly in control of Cambodia. Although his name, from the Sanskrit, means "lionhearted," he was a pampered prince, fussed over by a covey of nannies; not long ago, to illustrate the importance of milk...