Late in the evening of Tuesday October 6, 2009, the world's longest reigning living monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX of the Chakri dynasty of Siam, was restless and alone, unsteadily pacing the corridors of Siriraj Hospital on the west bank of the Chao Phraya river that loops and weaves through the unruly urban sprawl of Bangkok. Bhumibol, a revered ruler whose towering influence during six decades on the throne profoundly shaped the character and destiny of modern Thailand, had been admitted to Siriraj on September 19, a few months before his 82nd birthday, with a mild fever and difficulty swallowing. His recovery was complicated by his Parkinson's disease and a possible bout of pneumonia, and there were worrying whispers among well-connected Thais that the king was also sunk in deep depression. Even so, by the first week of October his doctors pronounced him well enough to be discharged to the nearby Chitralada Palace, where he had lived for most of his reign. But Bhumibol declined to go home. He remained at Siriraj, in a 16th floor room in a special section reserved for royal use in one of the hospital's towers. On October 4, a full moon hung in the sky over Siriraj, heralding the start of the holy kathin month in the ancient Theravada Buddhist tradition, an auspicious time for merit making at the end of the rainy season and the beginning the rice harvest. Two nights later, Bhumibol rose from his bed and went for a solitary walk along the quiet hospital corridors. Pausing at a window, he gazed out into the Bangkok night with his one good eye, searching the opposite bank of the Chao Phraya for the golden spires of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the Grand Palace, which for more than two centuries, since the founding of the Chakri dynasty, have represented the heart of spiritual and royal power in Thailand. They were shrouded in darkness, lost and invisible in the gloom. Bhumibol sent orders that the lights of the Grand Palace were not to be turned off during the night. He wanted to always be able see it from his hospital on the far side of the river. In Bangkok's frantic jumble of slums and shophouses, luxury high-rise condominiums and decrepit apartment buildings, stretching away to the horizon from Bhumibol's hospital windows, and in the constellations of provincial towns and rural villages beyond, many millions of Thais were anxious and fearful of the future. Millions were angry, too. Thailand was troubled and divided, and Bhumibol's illness seemed to be a reflection of the disorder that afflicted his kingdom, and a disquieting omen of turmoil to come. A decade earlier, brash Chinese-Thai telecoms billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra had launched an unprecedented effort to transform Thai politics with his authoritarian “CEO-style management” of the country. Thaksin had been more spectacularly successful than anyone had expected - so successful that the elderly courtiers and bureaucrats surrounding the king had come to view him as a dangerous rival to Bhumibol and an existential threat to the very survival of the Chakri dynasty. And so Thailand's establishment had turned on Thaksin. The escalating struggle threatened to tear the country apart, exposing deep ideological, social, regional and economic faultlines that belied the official myth of a harmonious and contented “Land of Smiles”. A proud nation that just a few years before had symbolized the emergence of Southeast Asia as a dynamic developing and democratizing region was suddenly flung backwards into conflict, self-doubt and confusion.