Si Quey: Crime, Legend and a Contested Legacy

A labourer from China

Si Quey Sae-ung was a Chinese immigrant who arrived in Thailand in 1944 and found work as a labourer in several provinces, beginning in Prachuap Khiri Khan, according to the Bangkok Post. He spoke little or no Thai, a detail later highlighted by people who doubted the case against him. He had no known family in the country, and decades after his death the Department of Corrections described him as stateless when nobody came forward to claim his body.

He spent part of his life in Thap Sakae district of Prachuap Khiri Khan. Residents there later remembered him as a member of their community, and it was villagers from Thap Sakae who, more than sixty years after his execution, led the campaign to give him a funeral.

The child deaths of 1954 to 1958

Between 1954 and 1958, children were killed in several provinces, including Prachuap Khiri Khan, Nakhon Pathom, Rayong and Bangkok. In 1958 Si Quey was arrested in Rayong, where police said he had been caught trying to dispose of the body of a boy by burning it. The Nation identified that child as eight-year-old Somboon Boonyakan.

Investigators went on to link Si Quey to the deaths of other children in other provinces. Officials alleged that organs had been removed from some of the victims and that he had eaten them, an accusation that turned a criminal case into a national horror story. Reports from the time say he confessed to the killings but denied the cannibalism allegation.

Confession, conviction and execution

Si Quey was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Sources differ on how many killings the conviction covered: the Bangkok Post has variously reported six and seven children, while The Nation described him as sentenced over the Rayong boy and accused of killing five other children. He was executed by firing squad at Bang Kwang prison on 16 September 1959, at the age of 32 according to the Bangkok Post.

Questions about the fairness of the process came later. Khaosod English noted that he confessed through interpreters at a time of strong anti-Chinese feeling in Thailand and may not have fully understood what he was agreeing to. The Bangkok Post also reported that a girl who survived an attack during the period said Si Quey was not the man who assaulted her.

Sixty years on display

After the execution, a doctor from Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok asked for the body for scientific study, and the hospital took it that same month. It was embalmed and displayed in a glass case at the hospital's medical museum for around six decades, under a label calling him a cannibal. His name became a byword across Thailand, and parents reportedly used it to frighten children into good behaviour. His story was dramatised on television, including a 1984 series.

In 2019 residents of Thap Sakae petitioned the National Human Rights Commission, asking for help to release the body so a proper funeral could be held, following an online campaign. In June 2019 the hospital changed the label from "cannibal" to "death row prisoner", and the Bangkok Post reported that the exhibit was withdrawn from public view in August 2019 after the complaint. A later Bangkok Post feature dated the removal to 2020, so accounts differ on the exact timing.

Cremation in 2020

In July 2020 the Department of Corrections announced that, since no relative had come forward, it would hold funeral rites itself, with Bang Kwang prison sponsoring the ceremony. Si Quey's body was cremated on 23 July 2020 at Wat Bang Praek Tai in Nonthaburi province. Thap Sakae residents attended, as did the actor who had played him as a killer in the 1984 drama. Khaosod English reported that the corrections department would decide whether the ashes were kept at the temple or scattered.

No later court ruling or official review of the conviction appears in the sources consulted. Searches for reporting from 2024 to 2026 found no new official developments; the case has continued to be revisited in podcasts and online retellings rather than in the courts.

A disputed legacy

Thai public opinion on Si Quey has shifted markedly. Many people in Thap Sakae who knew him believed he was innocent and had been made a scapegoat, and argued that modern forensic methods would not have supported a conviction. Khaosod English went further in its 2020 coverage, describing him in a headline as exonerated of cannibalism and reporting suggestions that someone else may have been responsible, although a police officer it spoke to declined to discuss the old cases. These views are claims and opinions; the 1959 conviction itself has not been formally overturned in the sources reviewed.

The case matters in Thailand for two reasons. First, it is a reminder of how a confession given through interpreters, by a foreign labourer during a period of ethnic prejudice, could lead to execution with little scrutiny. Second, the campaign around his remains changed practice at one of the country's best-known museums: a national human rights body was drawn into a dispute about the dignity of a person on display, a label was rewritten, and an executed prisoner was finally given funeral rites. For anyone writing about the case, it shows why a conviction, the allegations attached to it and the legend that grew around it need to be kept apart.