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List of regents

moment in a monarchy where someone else rules in name on the king or queen

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ173843
Source-derived summary

A regent is a person selected to act as head of state (ruling or not) because the ruler is a minor, not present, or debilitated. The following is a list of regents throughout history.

Regents in extant monarchies

Those who held a regency briefly, for example during surgery, are not necessarily listed, particularly if they performed no official acts; this list is also not complete, presumably not even for all monarchies included. The list includes some figures who acted as regent, even if they did not themselves hold the title of regent.

Asia

Cambodia

Prince Sisowath Monireth, Chairman of the Regency Council of Cambodia in 1960

Chea Sim, Acting Head of State of Cambodia from 1993 to 1994, and again from 1994 to 1995, and twice in 2004

Nhek Bun Chhay, Acting Head of State of Cambodia in 2004

Japan

Regent Empress Dowager Jingū for her son, the future Emperor Ōjin

Prince Regent Shōtoku for his aunt, Empress Suiko

Fujiwara Regents as Sesshō or Kampaku

Prince Regent Hirohito for his father, Emperor Taishō, from 1921 to 1926.

Jordan

Prince Naif bin Al-Abdullah from 20 July to 5 September 1951, due to the schizophrenia of his brother King Talal, who was in a Swiss mental hospital.

A regency council (Ibrahim Hashem, Suleiman Toukan, Abdul Rahman Rusheidat and chairing Queen Mother Zein al-Sharaf Talal) took over during the king's ailment and continued after the king's forced abdication (on 11 August 1952), serving from 4 June 1952 to 2 May 1953, until King Hussein came of age.

Crown Prince Hassan, from 4 July 1998 to 19 January 1999 while his brother King Hussein was undergoing cancer treatments.

Malaysia and its constitutive monarchies

Terengganu

Tengku Muhammad Ismail (eight years of age at the time), co-reigned with the three-member Regency Advisory Council (Majlis Penasihat Pemangku Raja) from 2006 to 2011. His father, Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin the Sultan of Terengganu was elected as 13th King of Malaysia.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “List of regents” as moment in a monarchy where someone else rules in name on the king or queen. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1960, 1993, 1994, 1995—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, regents and moment can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as moment in a monarchy where someone else rules in name on the king or queen. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q173843. The Library of Congress control number is sh85112342. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1993, 1994 and 1995.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “List of regents”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow List of regents primary sources, List of regents archive and List research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “List of regents”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from List of regents” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.