In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi is once again under house arrest. Earlier this year she was subjected to a sham trial, the purpose of which was to ensure that she’ll remain locked up until after the May 2010 elections. So there’s no better time to read Guy Delisle’s heart-breaking comic masterpiece Burma Chronicles (Jonathan Cape, £14.99). This graphic travelogue, which traces the artist’s time in Rangoon in whimsical, black-and-white drawings, is the most enlightening and insightful book on Burma in years. Buy it, and begin to understand the cruelty, injustice and absurdity of life in that beautiful, betrayed land.

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The 1999 movie Anna and the King, starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-fat, was the latest in a series of popular Western looks at then Siam in the 1860s through the eyes of an English teacher at the royal court in Bangkok. A little truth is mixed with a great deal of fiction.

“The King” was known in English as King Mongkut or Rama IV (1804-1868). He was the eldest son of the reigning king, and was educated as the heir apparent. When he was twenty he became a Buddhist monk for what was expected to be a short period. Soon after he entered the monastery, however, his father died. Surprisingly, he was passed over, and his half brother became king. Mongkut remained a monk for the next 26 years.

As a monk, Mongkut studied widely and deeply. He even learned a good deal of English. He traveled around the country, becoming acquainted with ordinary people in a way a prince or king never could have. Eventually, he undertook a thorough reform of Thai Buddhist doctrine and monastic practice.

In 1851, on the death of the king, Mongkut left the priesthood to ascend to the throne. He was an extraordinarily capable ruler, modernizing many aspects of his kingdom’s life while fending off threats from the British and other European colonialists.

The king took a strong interest in his children’s education, realizing that in the new world of expanding European and American pwoer and international trade they would require knowledge and skills earlier royal children had not needed. To teach English and other modern subjects in the palace, the king hired several wives of American missionaries and then, in 1862, Anna Leonowens.

Leonowens served the king for four years before moving to England.There she supported herself writing and lecturing about Siam, its king, and her experiences as teacher for the royal children. Her books patch together real observation with vivid imaginings and lurid tales. As a historian of the period has written, “It obviously proved lucrative [for Leonowens] to thrill her Victorian audiences with gruesome tales of eastern harem life.”

In 1944 the American writer Margaret Landon used Leonowens’s books as the basis for her novel Anna and the King of Siam. This, in turn, became a 1946 movie of the same name starring Rex Harrison. Then Rogers and Hammerstein set the story to music, producing The King and I on Broadway and as a movie in 1956 with the king played by Yul Brynner.

All of these versions have offend many people in Thailand. The dislike having their admirable scholar-king portrayed as a capricious tyrant.

A History of Modern Burma (Hardcover)
by Michael W. Charney
“An excellent work that deals with the period from the annexation of Upper Burma by the British in 1886 until the devastation of Cyclone Nargis in 2008. The focus is on the period from the 1930s, as self-government was gained in 1937. Charney, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS, is well qualified to write this work and he offers a careful account, one that is particularly nuanced in its coverage of the civil conflict and totalitarianism of recent years. What would be welcome is a similar work by Charney on Burmese history as a whole.” – The Historian

This is available in Kindle (boo hiss) but it might be worth tracking down because a Burmese writes it:

The Making of Modern Burma
by Thant Myint-U

Now this looks like a masterpiece (cough, cough, cough). Whoever could be producing it?
Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma 1775-1950 (Hardcover)
by Forrest McGill (Author), M.L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati (Author), Kazuhiro Tsuruta

At SFSU:

The river of lost footsteps : histories of Burma / Thant Myint-U.

Be aware too that her depiction of Rama IV of Siam, who spent decades as a monk before becoming the forward-looking leader of a country that successfully resisted British colonization, has offended many people in Thailand, who dislike having their revered scholar-king portrayed in such an inaccurate and superficial way.