The True Story of The
King and I
The story of a King falling in love with a lowly schoolteacher was an unthinkable occurrence in the 1800’s so it comes as no surprise that it was not a true story. However there was a Mrs. Anna Leonowens and she claims that she was the governess engaged by The King of Siam to teach his many children. However Thai Students have done some research and have found that King Mongkut kept extensive diaries and in the years that Anna was there, he only mentioned her once and then only briefly and that Anna was not employed as a governess, nor did she figure highly in the Royal Court. So which is the true story? Here are the Thai students findings and the claims Anna Leonowens made in her books so you can decide which is the true story of The King and I.
Taken from text
in the booklet from The stage musical
When King Mongkut, the Chakri Dynasty’s Fourth Monarch,
succeeded to the throne in 1851, he had already observed the subjugation of the
once-dominant Burmese by the British and the substantial concessions forced
upon the Chinese in the settlement of the Opium War. Thus, just as the west was
preparing to flex its muscle in Siam (as Thailand was known until 1939), King Mongkut
astutely abandoned the prevailing policy of conservative isolationism and preempted
any colonial intentions by inviting foreign diplomats to Bangkok for an
audience with the King.
King Mongkut’s wives and children lived in a part of
Bangkok Palace called the ‘Inside’, which comprised Gardens, shops, lakes and
even their own law courts and police station. Each wife had her own cortège of
two or three hundred women, which was increased if she bore a child; the total population
of the Inside was somewhere near three thousand.
King Mongkut chose to offer a decidedly modern
education to the denizens of the Inside. In 1862 King Mongkut thereby engaged
as Governess a widow named Anna Leonowens who, at the time, was teaching officers
children in a little school she had founded in Singapore.
One of the strangest pictures of history is that of a
Siamese Monarch determinedly using an original version of the English language
to seal his relations with Britain and America in the hope of guaranteeing the
independence of his nation.
Mrs. Leonowens would remain in Siam for five years, and
she documented her Palace experiences in two books entitled The English Governess
at the Siamese Court (1870)
And The Romance of The Harem (1873); Anna’s wanderlust
and lecturing tours led her around the globe until she finally settled in
Canada where she died in 1915.
King Mongkut’s eldest son Chulalongkorn – who learned
English from Anna Leonowens – was crowned King in 1868 as a minor and his reign
in the 42 prosperous years that followed is marked by far-reaching,
revolutionary reforms (including the gradual and bloodless abolition of slavery)
that have made him the most studied ruler in modern Thai history.
This is an account
made by Thai students
Anna
Leonowens is world famous as the governess in the Court of Siam due to the
popularity of the musical The King and I. Many people believed that they were
watching a true story. Not only regarding the antics of the King but also the
importance of Anna in the court. The film, starring Yul Brynner, so insulted
the Thai people, that it was banned from being shown in Thailand on grounds of
historical and cultural distortions. Now, a remake of the movie is being filmed.
Can Hollywood make amends for past misdeeds or will history repeat itself?
It
proved easy for historians to demolish Anna as a trustworthy historian because
both her books are filled with glaring errors. Even the title of the most
famous is inaccurate for, as King Mongkut's correspondence makes clear, she was
hired not as a governess, which implies a broad range of duties, but merely as
a teacher of English. In the text she makes elementary blunders regarding
Thailand's past, offers an explanation of Buddhism that is either hopelessly
confused or shamelessly lifted from other writers, and identifies a picture of
Prince Chulalongkorn (her most prominent student) as that being of a princess.
Though she claims to have spoken fluent Thai, most of her the examples she
offers are incomprehensible even with all possible allowances made for clumsy
transliterations.
Her
worst errors occur in The Romance of the Harem, when, one historian suggests,
"her store of pertinent facts were running low." In this she claims
that the King threw wives who displeased him into underground dungeons below
the Grand Palace and, most horrific, that he ordered the public tourture and
burning of the consort and a monk with whom she had fallen in love, a spectacle
Anna claims to have witnessed with her own eyes.
But
there were no underground dungeons at the Grand Palace or anywhere else in
Bangkok, and there could not have been in that watery soil. Nor was there any
public burning, or, if there was, it escaped the attention of every other
foreign resident, many of whom also wrote accounts of the same period. Anna
simply invented such tales, perhaps to add some spice to what would otherwise
have been a rather tepid work, just as she also exaggerated her own influence.
New
light has thrown doubt on the authenticity of not only the story but also of
Anna's background.
What Anna told about her life (Fiction)
Her name was Anna
Crawford, born in Wales, on November 5, 1834.
Her father was Captain Thomas Crawford, who died during a Sikh uprising in India when Anna was just 6 years old. Anna and her sister were at school in Wales at the time.
Anna and her sister moved to India on the completion of their education at the age of 14 or 15.
Her step-father wanted to marry her off to a man twice her age. To escape this situation, she went on a long tour of the middle east with the Reverand Percy Badger.
On her return she eloped, at the age of 17, to marry an army captain named Thomas Leonowens.
They lived in London for a while before, Thomas Leonowens, now a major, was posted to Singapore. Whilst there, Anna learned that the money that her father had left her had all been lost during the Indian Mutiny.
Major Thomas Leonowens suffered sunstroke on a tiger hunt and later died leaving Anna with two small children and no money.
Friends rallied round to help and she began a small school for officers' children. Her daughter Avis was sent back to England. Whilst in Singpaore she received the invitation to go to Siam (now Thailand).
What
historians now believe (Fact)
Her name was Anna Edwards, born in India in 1831.
Her father was Thomas Edwards, a cabinet maker who enlisted in the Bombay infantry. He died three months before Anna was born and her mother re-married to a corporal in the Engineers. Anna and her sister were sent to school in England.
Anna and her sister returned to India on the completion of their education at the age of 14 or 15.
Her step-father wanted to marry her off to a man twice her age. To escape this situation, she went on a long tour of the middle east with the Reverand Percy Badger
On her return she married, at the age of 18, a clerk called Thomas Leon Owens.
Thomas Owens had difficulty in keeping a job and they moved around a lot. They had two children called Louis and Avis.
Thomas Owens died of apoplexy in Penang, Malaya. Anna moved to Singpaore.
Friends rallied round to help and she began a small school for officers' children. Her daughter Avis was sent back to England. Whilst in Singpaore she received the invitation to go to Siam (now Thailand).
The
Truth About Anna
Anna claimed she was born in
Wales in 1834, which would have made her 28 when she arrived in Bangkok in
1862. Though not wealthy, her family was distinguished; her father was an army
captain and her mother came from an ancient Welsh family. When Anna was six,
she and a sister were left behind while her parents were posted to India where,
shortly afterwards, her father was killed in battle on the northwest frontier.
Anna said she completed her
education in Wales and at the age of 14 or 15 sailed for India. There an
unpleasant surprise awaited in the form of a new stepfather to whom she took an
intense dislike. One reason was he wanted to marry her off to a wealthy
merchant twice her age, while she in turn had fallen in love with a dashing
young army officer named Thomas Leonowens. To escape the situation she went on
a long tour of the Middle East with a well-known scholar, the Reverend Percy
Badger, and his wife, presumably friends of the family. According to the
distinguished traveller Dame Freya Stark, who wrote an introduction to a 1952
edition of The Romance of the Harem, she returned from the trip "with a
character already strongly formed, both for tolerance and independence."
She was independent enough to defy her stepfather and elope at the age of 17
with her young officer. They were blissfully happy, despite the death of their
first two children in infancy; two more, a boy and a girl, were born and
survived in London, where the couple lived for three years.
In 1857, Leonowens, by then a
major, was posted to Singapore and it was there Anna heard the bad news that a
small fortune left to her by her father had been lost in the collapse of a bank
during the Indian Mutiny. Worse was to come. A year late Major Leonowens
suffered a stroke on a tiger hunt and died, leaving her with two small children
and no money. She started a small school, bringing in enough to send her
daughter Avis back to England but not much more. A new challenge came with an
invitation from King Mongkut to go to Siam. With characteristic pluck off she
went, accompanied by her young son, Louis. A refined gentlewoman, marked by
personal loss but brave and determined to bring light to less fortunate lives -
that is the image of Anna drawn by herself, by all the actresses who have
portrayed her on stage and screen and even by historians who accuse her of
wilfully maligning a great man.
The first person to question the
image, almost accidentally, was Dr W.S. Bristowe, an academic whose specialty
was spiders but who also wrote on other subjects. Dr Bristowe was a frequent
visitor to Thailand and in the early 1970s he decided to writer a biography of
Louis T. Leonowens, founder of the company that still bears his name. Not many
people read the book that resulted, entitled - perhaps inevitably - Louis and
the King of Siam, which is unfortunate, for Dr Bristowe's deft detective work
on Anna's past revealed an extraordinary story.
It began in London with a
routine check to ascertain the exact date of Louis' birth. He found nothing,
either for Louis or for Avis. Nor, when he looked further, could he find anyone
named Thomas Leonowens who had served in the army, in either India or England.
Nor did the army know anything about the man Anna claimed to be her father.
Strangest of all, Welsh archives failed to yield any mention of Anna herself.
Dr Bristowe now set about
tracking down the elusive Anna with all the enthusiasm he normally gave to a
rare species of spider. Here is what a diligent search of Indian office records
eventually revealed. Anna was born, not in Wales but in India, not in 1834 but
in 1831. Her father was Thomas Edwards, a cabinet-maker from Middlesex who
enlisted in the Bombay infantry and went to the subcontinent in 1825. There he
married Mary Anne Glassock, the daughter of a gunner in the Bengal Artillery
and a local mother who, in all likelihood, was Eurasian.
The couple had two daughters,
Eliza and Anna, and Thomas died three months before the birth of the latter,
leaving his wife penniless. When Anna was two months old, her mother remarried,
this time to a corporal who not long afterwards was demoted to private. Here
the record blurred, but somehow - possibly through the assistance of a charity
- Anna and Eliza were sent to her father's relations in England, where they
presumably received an education.
They returned to India in their
early teens and entered a home which Dr Bristowe claims "must have
appalled them," for the life of a private soldier at the time was a
squalid one of "drunkeness and fornication." Eliza was married off at
15 to a 38-year-old sergeant and something similar was clearly planned for
Anna. Instead, at 14 she went off to the Middle East with the Reverend Badger.
How she met the clergyman (later to become a noted oriental scholar) is uncertain.
Anna married when she was 18,
not to a dashing young officer but to a 22-year-old clerk whose name was not
Leonowens but Thomas Leon Owens. He did not seem to hold any job for long and
the couple moved about frequently. Dr Bristowe never did pinpoint the precise
birth dates of Louis and Avis and finally concluded they must have taken place
on board a ship. At some other unknown time Leon Owens changed his name to
Leonowens, and the doctor did find a record of his death - of apoplexy - in
Penang, on May 8, 1859, where he was listed as a "hotel keeper."
According to Dr Bristowe, Anna
was already busily burying her past when she arrived in Singapore, so
successfully not even her own children penetrated her disguise. Among other
things, this required a complete break with her sister Eliza back in India, a
step she may have been doubly glad she took - given the social prejudices of
the time - if word ever reached her that Eliza's eldest daughter married a
Eurasian named Pratt. As thorough as ever, Dr Bristowe traced that family, too,
and made the engaging discovery the youngest child of the union - that is,
Anna's grand-nephew - became the actor Boris Karloff, of Frankenstein fame.
There is also evidence to
suggest Anna's performance may not have been flawless during her five years in
Bangkok. The capital's small British colony of merchants and consular officials
never asked her into their circle, despite her position at court. The only
respectable foreigners willing to take her at her word were American Protestant
missionaries, particularly the formidable Dr Dan Beach Bradley, their senior
member. These men and women gave her the friendship she needed so badly.
The inventions and distortions
of her books may have been partly designed to boost sales, as Prince Damrong,
one of King Mongkut's sons, suggested to Dr Bristowe in a 1930 meeting. It
could also be argued, they were also possibly aimed at convincing her
missionary friends that Anna Leonowens was truly a virtuous Christian woman,
worthy of their trusting kindness.
After leaving Thailand, Anna
spent some years in America, where her books were written, and eventually
settled in Canada with her daughter. There she died in 1915 at the ripe old age
of 85 (not 82 as her family and friends thought), still playing, by now with
accomplished skill, a role that might have challenged the best of her later
impersonators.
Anna lived in Halifax from 1876 to 1897. During her time in Nova Scotia, she pioneered many social programs and cultural institutions. One such achievement was the establishment of the Victoria School of Art, now known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She died in Montreal in 1915.
One of the main objections the Thai people had towards the movie was the way their very highly respected king was portrayed. King Mongkut was a deeply religious man and had spent most of his life in the monkhood. He was also educated in Western sciences and fluent in English. Today he is known to the Thai people as "The Father of Thai Scientists".
On the web site there is a picture of King Mongkut and his Queen taken about 1857. Anna Leonowens didn't arrive in Thailand for nearly another five years. By that time, King Mongkut was nearly 60 years old.
The film-makers claim that their new movie is based on historical fact. However, they not only show the king dancing with Anna but also suggest that they had a romance. In the climatic conclusion to the movie, you can see the king hanging underneath a wooden bridge preparing to blow it up!
On his accession to the throne, King Mongkut (Rama IV) was 47 years of age, having spent 27 years in the monkhood. During that long period in seclusion, he acquired a profound knowledge of Buddhism which he utilised in instituting a reform movement of the Buddhist Church. Western sciences and languages also absorbed his interest, as is attested by the fact that he specialised in astronomy and possessed a good working knowledge of English, which he learned from his American missionary friends. He also studied Latin with the Roman Catholic bishop and in turn taught him Pali. Thus he was well-equipped for the responsibilities of kingship, which account for the fact that he inaugurated a policy of modernising the country along Western lines, starting with the signing of a new set of treaties with the Western Powers in 1855.
King Mongkut opened the land to a vital flow of foreign commerce and opened men's minds to new ideas. He set up printing presses, built roads and canals, and issued the first modern currency to meet the requirements of his country's expanded trade. He reformed the administration, installed foreign advisers in government departments, called in European officers to improve the army and organised a police force. He reaffirmed the freedom of religion and encouraged the Christian missionaries in the educational and medical work. He also employed Mrs. Anna Leonowens, and English widow from Singapore, to teach English to his children. This modernisation policy, which benefited the country as a whole, was in most aspects continued and expanded by King Mongkut's successor, King Chulalongkorn, or Rama V, who ruled the country for 42 years (1868-1910).
So did Anna elaborate on the truth to sell her books? It is more than likely that she did. She was a woman who would have fitted in the world we live in today and would possibly have been a politician….