Angel Mountain: Inside the Alpine royal court of Queen Suthida

For years, Thailand's queen has been trapped in a gilded cage in Europe, living in a luxury hotel in the Swiss resort of Engelberg. Insiders have given me an insight into what her life is like.

Nestled beside a small lake at the top of a valley a thousand metres above sea level, surrounded by towering mountains, the little Swiss town of Engelberg is a breathtakingly beautiful place. In the winter, the town is carpeted with snow, with vicious blizzards regularly whipping through the streets. During the summer months, farmers lead their cattle up to the high Alpine pastures for grazing, and the snow-capped peaks sparkle in the sun.

Only a few thousand people live there permanently, but Engelberg — which means Angel Mountain — is a hugely popular destination for visitors. Tourists flock there to enjoy the stunning scenery and visit the medieval Benedictine monastery, where the monks also run a cheese factory. Skiers come for the superb vertiginous high-altitude slopes on Mount Titlis, the tallest peak in central Switzerland, which dominates the skyline south of the town — The Guardian newspaper describes Engelberg as “a mecca for powder-crazy freeriders”. Hikers arrive over the summer months to traverse the spectacular mountain trails through meadows and forests, and brave the Cliff Walk, the highest suspension bridge in Europe, over a plunging chasm below.

Four years ago a new and unexpected group of visitors from a kingdom more than five thousand miles away arrived to set up home in Engelberg. There were more than 60 of them, including servants, doctors, drivers, chefs, nannies, secretaries, dog walkers, musicians and security guards.

They moved into the luxury Hotel Waldegg, a 60-room seven-storey hotel built in 1962, perched on the slopes above Engelberg with panoramic views of the Alps from its south-facing balconies and even from its heated indoor swimming pool. They installed a special kitchen on the ground floor where they would make their own meals, and permanently reserved an adjacent conference room where they could gather and socialise during the day.

Suthida Tidjai, former Thai Airways flight attendant, general in the Royal Thai Army, and consort of King Vajiralongkorn, had come to make Engelberg her home.

When she arrived at Hotel Waldegg, Suthida was not even officially a member of the Thai royal family. Her relationship with Vajiralongkorn had been kept secret from the Thai people for years, never acknowledged by the palace.

But it was clear to everybody in Engelberg that she was a woman with some kind of special status. Her large entourage, and the way they crawled on the ground or stooped their bodies in deference in her presence, made that obvious, and raised eyebrows in a country which has long had a tradition of fierce egalitarianism — the Swiss are proudly independent people who are appalled at the concept of bowing down to anyone.

The reasons for Suthida’s lofty status soon became apparent, because from time to time she would have an even more exalted visitor in Engelberg — Vajiralongkorn himself.

Thailand’s king visited the town with scores of attendants, packing Hotel Waldegg beyond capacity, and enjoyed going on bicycle rides around the area wearing extremely skimpy clothing, one of his many infamous fetishes. His staff would walk his pet poodles through the streets of Engelberg, and he and Suthida would sometimes go shopping together, buying enormous amounts of trinkets, another well-known habit of the king.

Two years ago, just ahead of Vajiralongkorn’s official coronation ceremonies, he formally married Suthida in Bangkok on May 1, 2019, and she became queen of Thailand, but she continued to spend most of her time in Switzerland at Hotel Waldegg.

For years I have been trying to find out more about Vajiralongkorn’s life in Bavaria, where he has spent long periods living in another Alpine resort, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and about Suthida’s life in Engelberg.

It’s exceptionally difficult trying to penetrate the secretive world of the Thai royals in their European hideaways. Palace staff face severe punishment, including beatings and torture, if they are suspected of talking to a journalist. Hotel employees have been ordered to avoid the media at all costs, and have to sign draconian non-disclosure agreements. Thai security guards at the hotels in Germany and Switzerland are constantly on the lookout for reporters and photographers, and have a database with mugshots and car license plate details of known journalists. When a couple of Swiss newspaper journalists from Zurich went to Engelberg in June 2020 to try to report on the story, the Thai security team was aware they were in the town within just 30 minutes of their arrival, well before they had even tried to approach the hotel. Even local residents are mostly reluctant to talk about the royals.

But I was recently able to speak to some sources with direct knowledge of Suthida’s life in Engelberg, some of whom have connections within the queen’s entourage and others who acquired the information in other ways. For their safety, I can’t identify them any more specifically than that, but I have verified their identities, and their information on the queen’s life in Engelberg is genuine.

They chose to talk to me because they like and respect Suthida, and are horrified by the way she is treated by Vajiralongkorn, but Suthida herself is unaware that they have spoken to me and did not encourage or authorise this story in any way. The information they provided gives us an insight into the queen’s royal court in Switzerland for the first time.

This is the story of how a girl from Hat Yai became a flight attendant and then a queen, and of her sad existence in a gilded cage, surrounded by beautiful scenery but thousands of miles from home, lonely, constantly watched, abandoned and humiliated.