Anna Leonowens - inspiration for the 'King and I'

Anna Leonowens was a Victorian Indian-born British travel writer and teacher. Her memoirs of her days as a teacher in the court of the King of Siam (modern Thailand) in the 1860s inspired the musical 'The King and I'.

Anna Leonowens (1831 – 1915) was born in Bombay to a British corporal and a mother of mixed British and Indian origin. As an adult, Anna seems to have had little contact with her family and invented a new life story for herself in which she was raised in Britain and only arrived in India at the age of fifteen.

She was widowed in 1859 and moved to Singapore, where she established a school for the children of British officers in a effort to support herself and her own two children. Though the school failed, it established her reputation as an educator, and she received an offer to teach the wives and children of Mongkut, King of Siam.

The king wanted to give his 39 wives and concubines and 82 children a modern secular Western education, without the religious proselytising of the missionary teachers who had gone before. Anna sent her daughter back to England and moved to the Siamese court with her son.

She served at court for nearly six years until 1867, first as a teacher and later as a language secretary for the king. While she was on leave in England in 1868, the king died. The following year, Anna began to write travel memoirs, including of her time in Siam, and became famous.

It seems likely that most of her tales were exaggerated or imaginary. Relatives disputed her description of King Mongkut's character, particularly the king's alleged torture and execution of one of his concubines, Tuptim. These stories were further fictionalised in Margaret Landon's 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam, which then inspired the musical The King and I, which premiered in 1951.

Anna continued an adventurous life after her time at the Royal Court of Siam, living in the United States, Germany, and Canada.