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

Author:Donna Faulkner [Donna Faulkner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612306407
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2014-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

“The Roar of a Lion”

The King of Siam was tall for his time and region, standing about five feet, eight inches. He was thin and erect, a commanding figure. Photographs show him ranging from attractive to the opposite, with large ears, a wide drooping mouth, and a sometimes forbidding expression. His eyes were his best feature: warm and appealing, conveying a lively intelligence and curiosity.

By all accounts, Mongkut was an amazingly tolerant ruler. Although no democrat, he saw himself as his country’s most enlightened man, the monarch of a people wholly unready to rule themselves. He would push them into accepting his reforms, listen to their complaints and ideas, and make himself more approachable than his predecessors, but he was king by birthright, and his rule was absolute. Still, he accepted criticism without demur, effectively blessing freedom of speech and the press. When missionary Dr. Dan Bradley founded Siam’s first newspaper, the Bangkok Calendar, he was able to denounce the king’s “pernicious system of polygamy” without fear of retribution.

The king was greatly attached to white elephants. In reality, these beasts were only a bit less gray than most elephants, with white coloring and hair on parts of their bodies, but they were believed to carry the spirits of dead kings or heroes, and, thus, were signs of luck and prosperity. Mongkut eagerly joined the hunt whenever a new white elephant was seen in the jungle. He kept them in every luxury, with the finest food and attendants to sing and dance for their delight. But he had uniformly bad luck with his white elephants; most of those he caught died young.

The king also had his share of domestic troubles. The Lady Mahesavara, among Mongkut’s first consorts before his twenty-seven years as a monk, grew jealous of his young wives and concubines and irritated Mongkut with references to the time she had been his favorite. She once engaged his royal barge in a brazen race with her boat on the river; he subsequently confined her and all her servants to their quarters.

In his zeal for reform, the king issued decrees having an impact on every facet of Siamese life. Each new order was headed: “By Royal command, reverberating like the roar of a lion.” The message that followed was sometimes anti-climactic, as when he gave instructions for constructing burglar-resistant windows. But the spark of civic and national improvement never failed him. “His Majesty is graciously pleased to advise,” he once told his subjects, “that under no circumstances whatever should any person allow himself to throw a dead dog, a dead cat, or any other dead animal into the river or canal . . . where they will float up and down in great abomination. . . . the water supply in the city being so unclean as to breed in the dwellers thereof a number of unhappy ailments.”

Such long-winded earnestness would seem the antithesis of the Broadway vision of Mongkut. So would his reversal of one of his father’s edicts: Courtiers had been forbidden to wear upper garments, which might conceal weapons.

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