Her full name is made up of fifteen words, still far from the 25 of the late Duchess of Alba, but her fortune – estimated by Forbes at around 20 billion dollars – exceeds it more than 50 times: Muda Hassanal Bolkiah, Sultan of Brunei , the one with whom the spending figures are more like a state than a natural person, is going to marry Prince Abdul Mateen. And if the 30th birthday of Azim, the deceased brother of the bride and groom, was attended by people like Faye Dunaway, Lizzie Jagger, Jerry Hall, Mariah Carey, Raquel Welch and Marisa Tomei, let the reader calculate the level of what is about to happen.
For the last 600 years, the Bolkiah family has ruled a territory the size of La Rioja whose enormous wealth comes from oil. Sultan Hassanal, owner of the Palace Hotel in New York, lives in the largest palace in the world and the largest single-family residence ever built: 5,800 square kilometers, 1,788 rooms, 257 bathrooms (30 of them with gold fittings), a banquet hall with capacity for up to 5,000 guests and a mosque with capacity for 1,500 people.
Thus, they do not miss the monarch's whims as much as his personal fleet of airplanes. Not a private jet like Tom Cruise or Julio Iglesias. That's nonsense in Brunei. The sultan has a Boeing 747-400 Jumbo Jet, a Boeing 767, an Airbus A340-200, a Gulfstream IV, six small planes and two ANI-type helicopters, a collection to which he has just added the first ultra-long-range Airbus A340, Made in Texas and with capacity for 260 passengers. It cost him 100 million dollars and the same amount to customize it.
However, what draws the most attention to its heritage is its legion of 7,000 cars, an unbeatable Guinness record of its kind: 604 Rolls-Royce, 574 Mercedes, 452 Ferrari, 382 Bentley, 170 Porsche, 179 Jaguar, 21 Lamborghini and 134 Koenigsegg, a company that only manufactures 20 vehicles a year. But accumulating cars would be vulgar. The Sultan customizes (the Ferrari Mythos, the Jaguar XJ220, the Bentley Java and Dominator 4×4) or orders unique models built for him: the Aston Martin V8 Vantage Special Series II, the Cicero BDB Maestro, the Mercedes-Benz S73 T AMG and the right-hand drive CLK GTR, the Porsche Carma and the Koenigsegg Agera CC GT. There are no more of the latter in the world. He also has a BMW Nazca M12, and 10 McLaren models. Other small whims of Hassanal Bolkiah are the 1.7 million euros he spends a year on masseuses and acupuncturists, as well as the same amount on badminton classes.
Prince Abdul Mateen, 32, is one of the 12 children the sultan has had. He was born from his marriage to Hajah Mariam, his second wife, whom he divorced in 2003. Mateen studied in Brunei to graduate in International Politics from King's College London. He has a master's degree in International Studies and Diplomacy from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and received military training at Sandhurst Academy, like Princes William and Henry of England. He loves big cats and his main sporting hobby is polo: he has won the Sotogrande International Tournament and won bronze for his country in the Southeast Asian Games in 2017. His fiancée is Anisha Rosnah binti Adam, granddaughter of Isa Ibn Ibrahim, with the position of Special Advisor to the Sultan and member of the Prime Minister's Office, a position held by Crown Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah.
The celebration, which began yesterday, will last ten days. At the moment, we already know the first photo of the link: Anisha wore a traditional cloth baju kurung designed by Teh Firdaus in the ceremony called khatam al-Quran, in which the bride and groom formally propose to each other and blessings from the Quran are recited. The main ceremony will take place on January 14 in the enormous royal palace, the following day the banquet will be held and on the 16th the celebrations will end with a sacred reading, a great concert and a parade through the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan, capital of the sultanate. .
