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    Anna's Real-Life King of Siam
    Anna's Real-Life King of Siam
    Anna's Real-Life King of Siam
    Ebook32 pages34 minutes

    Anna's Real-Life King of Siam

    By Donna Faulkner

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    The people of Siam (now Thailand) were insulted when English governess Anna Leonowens, after spending five years as a royal tutor to his children, wrote two books depicting their beloved King Mongkut as a tyrant. Insult turned to outrage when Broadway and then Hollywood adapted her story as the musical The King and I.

    In fact, King Mongkut was Siam’s greatest ruler. Inheriting a country rife with medieval customs and feudal ignorance, he almost single-handedly brought Siam into the nineteenth century. Among his many accomplishments, he sparked the reform of the Buddhist religion; spoke eleven languages; mastered history, geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. The result: He?] transformed himself from a god-king to an approachable, tolerant leader. In a diplomatic triumph, he played European powers against each other so deftly that Siam, alone among the nations of Southeast Asia, never succumbed to colonial dominance. This short-form book shares the story of this thoroughly remarkable man.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew Word City
    Release dateMar 12, 2014
    ISBN9781612306407
    Anna's Real-Life King of Siam

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      Book preview

      Anna's Real-Life King of Siam - Donna Faulkner

      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 Buddhism and spoke eleven languages. He mastered history, geography, astronomy, and the principles of chemistry, physics, and math. He 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 upset 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 barbarian tyrant who burned alive one of his concubines for sleeping with another man. Eight decades later, the country now known as Thailand was even more offended when Broadway and Hollywood twisted the story into the musical 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). Worse, the libel of the errant concubine was central to the plot. In reality, Mongkut was both generous and open-minded - the first Siamese king to free women to leave the harem at will.

      Anna Leonowens has few fans in Bangkok; one of the king’s biographers denounced her as the perfidious and mendacious governess. But a few of the king’s admirers concede that if she hadn’t written her sensational books, Mongkut would likely be a forgotten figure outside of Thailand. Today, his cartoonish popular image is offset by his historic record as the unlikely savior of his country. He was, as you are about to read, a thoroughly remarkable man. Here is his story.

      A Boy Named Crown

      The child who was to bear the royal title Somdetch Phra Pramdendr Maha Mongkut was the grandson of King Rama I, the general who founded the Chakri line of kings that still holds the constitutional monarchy of modern Thailand. Born in 1804, he was the forty-third child of Rama II,

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