The King and I

Still cleaning out some of the stuff that’s accumulated around here over the years. Yesterday I ran across a program from “The King and I.” We saw the performance at the Kennedy Center a number of years ago. I remember that “The King and I” movie was banned in Thailand when I was there — probably still is, but I’m not sure.

I imagine most of you have seen either the movie or the stage presentation, but in case you’re not familiar or have forgotten… The movie and musical is a performance version of a semi-fictional novel that was in turn based on the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, in which she presents her version of events that supposedly took place while she was an English teacher at the court of King Mongkut (also known as King Rama IV) of Siam (present-day Thailand.) Mrs. Leonowens was hired to teach English, and maybe some other subjects, to the king’s many wives/mistresses and children.

There’s a lot of reasons that “The King and I” was banned in Thailand. In the movie/play, Anna was portrayed as the head-strong governess that tamed the king of Siam, but is that who she really was, or was she just a low-down dirty liar? 
I did some extensive research and here’s what I found…..

Anna’s autobiography says she was born Anna Crawford in 1834 in Wales, but the truth is her maiden name was Anna Edwards and she was born in India in 1831.
Her father was reported to be an army captain who died during a Sikh uprising in India when she was six years old — the truth is her father was a cabinetmaker who died three months before she was born. 

Another falsehood is that she married Major Thomas Leonowens when she was 17. He died of sunstroke during a tiger hunt in Singapore. But the truth is she did marry young, at age 18, but her husband’s name was Thomas Leon Owens. Thomas had difficulty keeping a job and the couple moved around a lot. He died of apoplexy in Penang, Malaya in 1859.

The story is that she was a highly respected British governess, But she was not a governess — a position with a broad range of duties in the royal household of Siam — she was simply a teacher of English. That was what King Mongkut hired her for. 

In her book The Romance of the Harem, she claimed that King Mongkut was a tyrant and threw his wives into underground dungeons if they failed to please him — there were no underground dungeons in Siam.
As famously portrayed in Anna’s story, King Mongkut ordered the public torture and beheading of one of his mistresses who had fallen in love with a monk. That whole episode appears to be nothing more than an invention. There were many foreign correspondents in Siam at the time and none of them mention much an incident.

The movie hints at a romance between Anna and the king, and the movie and play both suggest Anna became very close to the king. The truth is that King Mongkut hardly knew Anna Leonowens. The king kept detailed diaries and in the five years that she worked in the royal court, he mentions her only once, and then only briefly. 

It appears that Anna came to respect King Mongkut and praised him for his visionary outlook. But — in her writings Anna presented the king as a conservative, intolerant, reactionary bigot who was stuck in a time warp. She did not give him any credit for his modern policies and his embracing of Western knowledge. 

In “The King and I,” Anna was opposed to the British imperialist attitude toward Siam and courageously stood up to the British hierarchy on behalf of her adopted people. Not so — Anna was, in fact, an imperialist defender and a great supporter of the British colonial ventures in the Far East.  She purposefully portrayed the people of Siam as childlike and backward to strengthen public support for British intervention and “enlightenment.”

One major fabrication in all this is that Anna became known as an authority on all things Siamese and lived her later years in respected retirement, but the truth is as soon as first book was published, Anna was sued for plagiarism and the dissemination of false information. The more books she wrote, the more court cases she generated. The academic world refused to acknowledge her writings, and she was roundly condemned as a sensationalist writer of fiction.

So….. “The King and I” was not only loosely based on Anna Leonowens’ accounts, but historians believe many of Anna’s own recollections were exaggerated or totally made-up. “The King and I” may be an interesting movie that contains elements of Thai history and culture, but it is severely lacking when it comes to being factually correct. About the only thing about the Anna legend that appears to be true is that she did serve for five years in the royal court of Siam. 
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