Anna's Real-Life King of Siam

He was the greatest ruler in his country’s history. Inheriting a Siam of medieval customs and feudal ignorance, King Maha Mongkut almost single-handedly lifted it into the nineteenth century. He sparked the reform of the Buddhist religion; spoke eleven languages; mastered history, geography, astronomy, and the principles of chemistry, physics, and math; and transformed himself from a god-king to the approachable, tolerant father of his people. And in a diplomatic triumph, he played the rapacious European powers against each other so deftly that Siam, alone among the nations of Southeast Asia, never succumbed to colonial dominance.

Thus, his people were more than a little miffed when an English governess, Anna Leonowens, cashed in on her five years as a royal tutor and secretary to write two lurid books slandering the king as a capricious tyrant. Eight decades later, the country now known as Thailand was even more offended when Broadway and Hollywood twisted the story again in The King and I. On stage and screen, Yul Brynner pranced around bare-chested, indulged in imperious tantrums, and tormented Mongkut’s quaintly colorful English into a kind of pidgin (“Is a puzzlement”).

Anna Leonowens has few fans in Bangkok; one of the king’s biographers denounced her as “the perfidious and mendacious governess.” Yet, his cartoonish popular image is offset by his historic record as the unlikely savior of his country - and, as this Kindle Single shows, a thoroughly remarkable man.