Monarchs Reign From Bhutan to Brunei, Nepal to Thailand : Asia’s Surviving Royalty Displays Diversity, Common Touch

On a continent where kings were once revered as gods, Asia’s half a dozen surviving monarchies include a diverse clutch of modernizing kings and a sultan who wields absolute power.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, the world’s longest-reigning monarch after the death of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, has initiated several thousand rural projects and spends much of each year in the countryside personally helping peasants design irrigation canals, improve crops and combat disease.

Aside from Thailand and Japan, monarchs also reign in Nepal and Bhutan in the Himalayas, Brunei on Borneo and Malaysia in Southeast Asia.

Educated at Harvard

Unlike his remote predecessors in Nepal, Harvard-educated King Birendra crisscrosses his mountainous nation and has set a goal of fulfilling the basic needs of an impoverished populace by the year 2000.

In the kingdom of Bhutan, His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck pores over economic development plans and almost daily deals with petitions submitted by subjects.

Hirohito is widely credited with having helped Japan’s postwar economic miracle by preserving national unity and traditional virtues through his symbolic role. But the late emperor, who renounced his divinity after Japan’s defeat in World War II, spent most of his 62 years on the Chrysanthemum Throne behind the walls of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace.

His son and successor, Emperor Akihito, 55, broke with tradition by marrying a commoner and has traveled with his family by train, thrown out the first ball at baseball games and mixed with his fellow Japanese at numerous public functions.

Though he is expected to breach some of the barriers between emperor and subjects, Akihito is unlikely to interact as intimately with his subjects and their daily problems as do the other Asian royals--nor wield anywhere near as much tangible power.

The most powerful and richest of the continent’s five remaining hereditary monarchs is Brunei’s Sultan Muda Hassanal Bolkiah, an absolute ruler who resides in a 1,788-room palace and keeps some of his 200 horses in air-conditioned stables. Fortune magazine last year named him the world’s richest man, with assets estimated at $25 billion.

Besides being head of state, he is also prime minister and defense minister and has included two of his brothers in the Cabinet to help rule over the oil-rich nation about the size of Maryland on the north coast of Borneo island.

Brunei’s sultan harks back to days when the pomp, pageantry and proclamations of hundreds of bluebloods--kings, princes, sultans, maharajahs and nizams--were as vital a part of Asia as its rice fields.

But by mid-century, royal ranks had been thinned by communist revolutions, independence struggles and the spread of Western democracy. Other crowns have toppled in more recent times.

The last emperor of China abdicated in 1912. Communists ended imperial rule in Vietnam at the end of World War II. India’s independence from Britain in 1947 sounded the knell for myriads of royals. Cambodia’s kingdom ended amid war and chaos in 1970, though Prince Norodom Sihanouk, formerly the king, is still active as an exiled guerrilla faction leader. The last king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, was toppled in 1973 and is exiled in Italy but recently offered to help in a transitional government in his country.

Today, there remain but five Asian hereditary kingdoms and Malaysia, where every five years one of the country’s sultans is elected a constitutional monarch.

Nine of Malaysia’s 13 states have sultans who are constitutional heads of the state governments. They have no political power. Every five years these sultans meet to elect by secret ballot one of themselves to be the national king. By tacit agreement each state gets a turn at having its sultan king sooner or later. At the national level the king is the constitutional head of state, but political power rests with the prime minister.

The current king of Malaysia is Sultan Mahmood Iskandar from Jahore state. His term expires this year.

Today’s Asian monarchies have deep roots and their foreseeable futures appear secure.

Akihito is 125th in a line of emperors said to stretch back 2,600 years in Japan. Though historians regard the first 14 emperors as figures of myth, the Japanese imperial line is still the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy, and current public opinion polls favor its continuation.

Bhumibol, probably the most respected man in Thailand, is heir to 750 years of monarchy.

Hassanal Bolkiah is Brunei’s 29th ruler, while Nepal and Bhutan both have centuries-old royal traditions.

Although a constitutional monarch, the 61-year-old Thai king is regarded as semi-divine by some and widely viewed as having held the country together in wake of the coups and abortive power grabs that have marked recent decades. He openly intervened to stop a serious student-led uprising in 1973 and has in other moments of national crisis played a decisive behind-the-scenes role.

Named king in 1946 and crowned four years later, when he was a jazz-loving teen-ager, Bhumibol was initially viewed as someone to be used by military strongmen. Instead, he gradually reversed the decline in prestige of the throne, largely by bypassing the elite to work for the mass of have-nots in the countryside.

Nepal’s Birendra, 43, likewise has sought links with the rural poor, making frequent trips to remote areas to hand out relief supplies and sound out the problems of villagers. But knowledgeable sources in Nepal and neighboring India say much of the effort is negated by corruption within the royal family and its retainers--an open secret in Katmandu, the capital.

Birendra has initiated some political reforms during his 16-year rule, but there are quiet critics of both the monarchy and limited democratic rights. The king himself, seen as a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, by law cannot be criticized.

In Bhutan, Wangchuck, 33, has continued his father’s attempts at political evolution and improvement in the lives of his 1.4 million, largely illiterate, people.

“Development is important, but preserving our culture and our values is equally important,” the publicity-shy Wangchuck has said.

Bhutan was opened up from its medieval seclusion by his reform-minded father.

International aid agencies have been welcomed to Bhutan, but mass tourism has not. Tourism is seen as a destroyer of the old ways upheld by Wangchuck, who always wears the traditional, robe-like kho --even while playing basketball.

Brunei’s politics are said to be among the most sterile in Asia, but the tiny state’s 227,000 people have yet to show significant signs of discontent. Under the 42-year-old sultan, the country continues to prosper from its oil and natural gas reserves. Medical care and education are free, and the per capita annual income of $21,000 is among the highest in the world.

The sultan, who has snapped up hotels, companies and other investments around the world, moves freely among his subjects and is credited with a number of civic improvements.