Many of you have seen the film "The King & I", (which is banned in Thailand) supposedly the "true" story about the adventures of widowed schoolteacher Anna Leonowens
However she did make up her memoirs & lied about her employer, King Mongkut & her life. Mrs. Leonowens claimed that she was born in Wales in 1834 under the name Anna Crawford & that her father was captain Thomas Crawford who died during a Sikh uprising (the Indian Mutiny?) The truth was that Leonowens was born in an army barrack in India to a Welsh father ( a former cabinet maker) & Eurasian mother in 1831, under the name of Anna Harriet Emma Edwards. She also said that they moved to India when Anna was 14 or 15, but it seems now that she was in England for a while & then returned to India. It seems clear that Anna was telling the truth that her step-father wanted to marry her off, but she left with a Rev. Percy Badger to tour the exotic Middle East. She also claimed that she married an army captain named Thomas Leonowens, who then moved to Singapore with Anna however she was married to a clerk named Thomas Leon Owens, who had trouble keeping a job. Her husband, supposedly died from heatstroke after going on a tiger hunt, however he died of apoplexy in Penang & the widowed Anna moved with their two children Avis & Louis She eventually received an invitation, in 1862 to go to Siam (Thailand) to teach the children of King Mongkut. She made frivolous claims that her employer was a tyrannical fool. But the truth was that Mongkut was a brilliant man & thanks to him & his son King Chulalongkorn, Siam was independent of Western imperialism. Leonowens claimed that one of Mongkut's concubines, Lady Tuptim, was burned at the stake for dressing as a Buddhist monk so she could have an affair. Anyway, Mrs. Leonowens, who we can figure the king might have found irritating, because of her arrogance, left Siam in 1867 to visit her daughter Avis. It was in New York that Anna received news that King Mongkut had died of malaria in 1868. She eventually told of her travels, which she made into a book "The English Governess at the Siamese Court" which was novelized by missionary Margaret Landon, who actually lived in my hometown of Wheaton, Illinois & I know Mrs. Landon's grand-niece ( the wife of my church small group leader) Now here's the stuff about Anna & Russia. In 1881 she was sent to Russia just weeks after the assassination of the czar & wrote stating that the culprits were being unfairly tried & that Czar Alexander III was being brutal & figured that a revolution would come. Mrs. Leonowens eventually returned to America & she died in 1915
