If Wishes Were Houses

 

 

Louis and the King of Siam

Earlier this year, before I left for Thailand, I read a book titled ‘Louis and the King of Siam’. It is a biography following the life of Louis T. Leonowens and was written by W.S.Bristowe in 1976.

 

 

Louis T. Leonowens

Louis was the son of Anna Leonowens. His mother, Anna, historically became somewhat of an odd character. One we all incorrectly recognize and know.

Most of us know Anna from the early Broadway show of Rodgers & Hammerstein, then turned film musical of 1956, ‘The King and I’. The original book that the ‘King and I’ was taken from was a novel written in 1944 by Margaret Landon. Originally it was subtitled “The Famous True Story of a Splendid Wicked Oriental Court.” That title is obviously in the tradition of what we now know as ‘orientalism’ – cultures that the Western world viewed as exotic, undeveloped, irrational and primitive.

Finding out that Louis was Anna’s son, I was intrigued by his life and story. Especially when I learned that at the age of five, in 1862, he moved to the Royal Court in Bangkok. Anna, his mother, had been hired to teach the wives and children of King Mongkut, Rama IV of Siam.

Mongkut was a fascinating character. He spent over twenty-seven years as a monk and became head abbot at Wat Bowonniwet. When he became king at age forty-seven, he embraced Western science, studied Latin and played the countries trying to colonize Siam against each other. Having been celibate for 27 years, he now set about building the biggest Royal Family of the Chakri Dynasty. In the "Inside" of the Palace there was a veritable city of women—reports say three thousand or more. They were mostly servants, Amazons for guards, officials, maids and so on, but Mongkut acquired 32 wives, and by the time he died, aged 64, he had 82 children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongkut

 

Raised in a Royal Palace

Louis was raised in the royal palace for nearly six years and was schooled alongside the royal children there. As a child he became close friends with Prince Chulalongkorn, the future King Rama V.

Louis’ mother, Anna, [of novel and Hollywood stardom one hundred years later] was an Anglo-Indian who had never been to Britain. She married her husband, Thomas Leon Owens in India in 1849. He was an Irish-born, India-raised clerk.

Louis was born in Australia in 1856, after his parents had moved there from India. In 1857 the family moved to Indonesia where his father managed a hotel. He died in 1859. After his death, Anna moved to Singapore with Louis and his older sister. There, she told the British expatriate community that she was a genteel Welsh woman. The widow of a British army officer. She had, unfortunately, lost her fortune.

She was believed.

In 1862, when she was invited to teach in Siam, she sent her daughter to Britain. Louis accompanied her to Bangkok where he spent his childhood in the Kings royal court. In 1867 he was sent to Europe to compete his education. By 1874 he was in the U.S. with his mother. There he accumulated debt and fled from the U.S.

Then he was estranged from his mother for nineteen years.

That’s where this tale begins.

[Turns out Anna was anti-slavery, a feminist, writer, and a world traveler. See the site list below for the story of her long and complicated life.]

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Louis was granted a commission as the Capitan of the Royal Calvary in in Siam. He was 25 years old. It was 1881 and the job was offered by his childhood friend, now King Chulalongkorn.

 

 

Teak Trade

In 1884 he left the royal military to start his own business – trading and selling teak lumber. He founded the Louis T. Leonowens Ltd., a Thai trading company that still bears his name.

While reading the book about his intriguing life, it mentioned a house that Louis had built in Lampang, Thailand, after he had established his trading company. It said that people from Europe and all of the royal families in Thailand, Burma and Cambodia would stop in to visit him there. His office was there too.

Further intrigue. I Google searched his name in Lampang. There it was, still is – the house built in 1903 by Louis T. Leonowens.

 

 

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Lampang

I had never been in Lampang before. I knew it was on the rail-line from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. I decided to stop in Lampang when I headed north – to see the house that was, allegedly, still there.

I love the north night-trains from Bangkok. As usual, I bought a 2nd class ticket. It is an open window coach. Who doesn’t want to lay in bed, the wind and night air blowing in – the visible mulch and compost of thousands of years of cultivation and toil in the sun, all lit by the moon?

I left Bangkok at 10:30 at night. I arrived in Lampang at 11:30 the next morning.

Before I headed north I had reserved a stay at the TT&T Guesthouse. The only reason I chose it was because of the TT&T Truck-stop in Tucson.

The name reminded me of home. And it’s on the Wang River there.

 

 

Once I got off the train I just had to jump a songtow [a side-bench seat pick-up truck] to take me to the guesthouse. Fifteen minutes later we crossed the Wang River and I was at my new guesthouse. A fine place built out in several local wooden houses. I was the only guest there.

I took a shower and then a nap. When I woke up a couple of hours later I looked at the map-app on my phone to see where I was in relationship to the Louis T. Leonowens house.

It was two block away.

I tossed on some clothes and walked down the street.

Before I got to the house one of the horse carriages that Lampang is known for clopped past me.

 

A Teak House

I kept walking and a half block later, through the gate, there it was. I walked through the large yard to Louis’ house.

There was no one around . Though I had read that the house was opened and empty, the door under the main room had a lock on it. I walked around the place looking at all the sides. The office building is to the right of the house. A pretty brick building in a somewhat Chinese style.

 

 

I knew that the buildings were on Thai National Forestry land. I had passed the office for the forestry on my way over, so I went down a small dirt trail over to their office. The National Forestry Office is another beautiful older building and in keeping with their quest, is surrounded by massive trees. Some of them were teak. Then I spotted the leaves – were these massive mesquite trees?

         

 

I walked into the forestry office and was met by a man who was obviously one of the higher ups. He was being trailed by two women with clip boards and he asked me if I was looking for someone. I told him that I was interested in seeing the Leonowens house but it seemed to be locked up.

Was there anyone with a key?

 

A Man with Keys and Toads

He told me Yes.

There was a man who had keys. He lived in one of the small houses that was on the same property. When he saw that I didn’t know where to go, he told the women with him that he was going to walk me over. They wai-ed him and backed away. He took me out the door and back to the property where indeed, there were some smaller wooden row-houses along the road. Everyone who saw him said Sawat Dii and wai-ed his presence. We walked up to one of the porches where people lounged on bamboo beds and he called out,

‘Dang?’

An older, potbellied small man in a T-shirt jumped up from his nap and gave his superior a wai. The head officer told him that I wanted to see the old house on the property – did he have keys? Yes. He pulled a coil-chain from his pocket and there they were.

But things didn’t end there. Almost always in a Thai group there will be a series of questions:

How old are you?

Do you have a Thai girlfriend?

Why not?

When they ask my name I always tell them the name given to me long ago by friends in Northeast Thailand. In English the name is ‘Little Frog’. It always causes everyone to laugh hysterically, which they all did.

While they were all talking and laughing one of the older women suddenly said,

‘Hey! Little Frog! Want some little toads for lunch?’

 

She pulled out a big plastic tub from under the bed. It was full of live toads. Turns out they were just getting ready to broil them. When I told them that I didn’t think I could eat them they all laughed at my Western weakness.

Why would anyone turn down a delicious snack? If not toads, did I want to take the baby?

 

The man with the keys grabbed his bike and told me he’d meet me at the house. After wai-ing the boss he took off. I wai-ed the head honcho and thanked him for his help. Everyone wai-ed him, then me, and we all went our ways.

I had made my way from Arizona to see this place. I walked back to the house .

The door was opened.

 

Advantages

There were a couple dozen easels in the lower room. Every one had posters made with photographs explaining the history of the house. They were all written in Thai and though I’m a pretty avid speaker, reading Thai is a whole other tactical gambit.

The early 20th C. photographs were fascinating enough.

Told here was the visual story of the teak lumber industry, the destruction of the natural world; the life of a British boy accessing his Western status to advantage his Siamese class upbringing. Pictures of chained elephants hauling logs. Thousands of teak logs jammed in the Wang River. Boats in Bangkok loaded with tropical virgin lumber. A shipment of the last frontier for the British timber industry that first exploited the teak reserves of India. They then moved to Burma. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries they extended their reach to the then pristine forests of northern Thailand.

 

Looking back on what colonizers did to the natural world can be disturbing. Yet, I sometimes look at the advantaged classes of people I know and question their undertakings too. Then here I am. I want to save this house!

As a human race we are all so capable of creating a disadvantaged natural world for our own, personal convenience.

That’s all Louis was doing too.

And what a beautiful house he had built.

I have been in many old Thai wooden houses. Thai’s really have a creative edge to beauty when they build. The colonial entrepreneurs that entered the East brought with them attributes that people here developed even further. In terms of craftsmanship, the Thai’s excelled.

 

Dang Opens the Doors

After I looked at the photographs in the lower room I asked Dang if I could look at the upper level. With no attentiveness whatsoever, he pushed aside a couple of the easels. Behind them was a large door above which hung a portrait of Louis. He shoved the door opened and said,

‘The stairs are here.’

 

We went up the back staircase. There, at the north edge of the house, was a long hallway.

 

The hallways leads to the large circular sunroom that can be seen on the front exterior of the house. The ceiling wedges from the center of the room to each wall shutter.

This room opens to the front staircase.                                                      

 

 

The shutters in the large room are exquisite. They are all linked to side slats that rotate up and down, shifting every shutter-slat together equally.

The shuttered sunroom leads into the living.room.

The living room has stairs to the bedroom.

Dang told me that the bedroom has special shutters. There is a rail built around the bottom of the windows in the bedroom. The shutters to the windows can be shut at the top and opened along the bottom rail. As everyone slept on the floor, this allows wind to blow through the room at the floor level…brilliant.

I walked through the rooms looking at every detail. All of the abandoned beauty sitting vacant.

 

In 1906, just three years after Louis T. Leonowens built his house, he became less involved in the lumber trade. He left Siam for the last time in 1913.

Leonowens died in 1919 during the global influenza pandemic. He is buried, with his second wife, Reta May, in Brompton Cemetery, London.

 

If wishes were houses, beggars would abide.

If dreams were the future, I’d have one inside.

If “if’s” and “and’s” were travels and land,

There’d be more work for a writers hand.

 

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https://www.thoughtco.com/anna-and-the-king-truth-3529493

The fascinating life of Anna:
https://www.revolvy.com/page/Anna-Leonowens?cr=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_T._Leonowens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_wishes_were_horses,_beggars_would_ride

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/life/A-toast-to-teak-30177960.html