Princess Bajrakitiyabha, the eldest child of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn and a long-time figure in the succession debate, has died at 47 after more than three years in a coma. The royal household said she died at 19:48 local time on the previous day at Chulalongkorn Hospital.

Her death closes the chapter on a palace figure many Thai royalists had quietly treated as one of the few plausible answers to an unresolved question at the top of the monarchy. King Vajiralongkorn has not named an heir, and in a system where succession remains sensitive and heavily shaped by tradition, her absence leaves that issue back at the center of attention.

The princess collapsed in December 2022 while exercising her dogs, and doctors later said the episode was caused by a severely irregular heartbeat linked to a mycoplasma infection in her heart. Since then, she had remained in a coma while the palace said her medical team gave her the closest and most intensive care possible, but that her condition continued to decline progressively.

Born on 7 December 1978 to Vajiralongkorn’s first wife and cousin, Princess Soamsawali, Bajrakitiyabha trained as a lawyer and earned two post-graduate degrees at Cornell University in the United States. She worked briefly at Thailand’s mission to the United Nations in New York, then returned home to serve in the Attorney-General’s offices in Bangkok and elsewhere before becoming Thailand’s ambassador to Austria from 2012 to 2014.

That posting also deepened her ties with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and after she returned to Thailand she became its Ambassador for the Rule of Law in South East Asia. In 2021, her father elevated her further, naming her chief of staff in his private bodyguard and giving her the rank of general.

Even before her death, the succession picture was complicated. Thai custom says the heir should be male, but a 1974 constitutional amendment allows a woman to take the throne. Vajiralongkorn has five sons; four from his second marriage were disowned in 1996 and have lived with their mother in the United States since then, while his fifth son, Dipangkorn, from his third wife, is widely regarded as the presumed heir.

For years, Bajrakitiyabha stood apart from that uncertainty because of both her public profile and the respect she drew among royalists who saw her as the most promising successor. Her death does not settle the question of what comes next for Thailand’s monarchy. It makes it harder to avoid.