A Collection Of What We Love In Numismatic History

Fantastic!

Welcome to CCF slapsshot. Thank you for the kind words, but I am just learning just like everyone else here. I look forward to seeing your contributions. As far as your question goes, the set was minted in late 1834 and included a medal, not of young Lincoln who would have been about 25 at the time, but of then President Andrew Jackson. The King of Siam set has storied history, some of it recounted below by numismatic scholars during the time of the Contursi sale. Might as well throw in a picture of the beautiful set again.



The fabled King of Siam proof set, originally given as a diplomatic gift on behalf of U.S. President Andrew Jackson to the King of Siam (now Thailand) in 1836, was purchased for a record price of $8.5 million by Steven L. Contursi, President of Rare Coin Wholesalers of Dana Point, California on November 1, 2005.

The set was sold by Ira & Larry Goldberg Coins & Collectibles of Beverly Hills, California on behalf of an anonymous owner described as "a West Coast business executive" who purchased it for over $4 million four years ago.

"I watched this extraordinary set sell at two auctions over the years, and I always wanted to own it because it's a national treasure. It is history, adventure and artistic beauty," said Contursi.

Ira Goldberg and his cousin, Larry Goldberg, issued a joint statement about their role as brokers on behalf of their unidentified client: "It has been our dream to handle the sale of the King of Siam proof set ever since its existence was first made known to the numismatic world in 1962. We are proud that we've sold it three different times over the past 15 years, twice at public auctions and now by private treaty. This was the most exciting sale because it shattered the previous record. It's the number one numismatic treasure."

The set includes the original, custom-made yellow leather and blue velvet case that housed the coins when U.S. State Department envoy, Edmund Roberts, presented it during an overseas trade mission on behalf of President Jackson to King Ph'ra Nang Klao (Rama III) of Siam in April 1836. The King's son, Rama IV, was the subject of the book, "Anna and the King of Siam," and the famous Broadway musical, "The King and I."

The King of Siam set was minted sometime in late 1834. Roberts took it with him on a voyage aboard the USS Peacock in 1835 and arrived in Siam in the spring of 1836. Included in the sale to Contursi was the ship's original log from the voyage of the Peacock in 1835.

"In the annals of American numismatics, nothing can compare with the legendary presentation set of United States coins that was given to the King of Siam," said Kenneth E. Bressett, a former President of the American Numismatic Association and co-author of a reference book about the set, "The Fantastic 1804 Dollar." He served as a consultant to Contursi in this transaction.

"No other group of coins can boast of a more absolute pedigree, or such an illustrious past. Measured in terms of collector appeal, rarity, romance and value, this set is unparalleled and will forever hold its place as one of the most desirable numismatic items in the world. New price records have been broken with each sale of comparable individual items that are included in this set, and it is likely that all records may be shattered with the sale of this monumental set," said Bressett.

It is believed the King of Siam's son, Rama IV, later gave the coin set to his British governess, Anna Leonowens, who died in 1915. More than 120 years after their presentation to the King, two descendants of Leonownes sold the coins to a London, England dealer in the late 1950s. The existence of the King of Siam set was announced to the astounded numismatic world in 1962, according to Bressett.

The set contains one of the eight original "Class 1" 1804 silver dollars along with other numismatic treasures struck in 1834. It is believed that four sets were originally assembled as gifts to world dignitaries, but only two were ever delivered before emissary Roberts died. The other sets were returned to the United States Mint and eventually broken up.

The set also contains an 1833 gold medal depicting President Jackson. Although believed to be part of the set when delivered to the King of Siam in 1836, the Half Dime and Jackson medal were not included when the set turned up in London a half century ago. The two present replacements were included by subsequent owners more than a decade ago to fashion the set as it probably looked when presented to the King.

The individual items in the set were authenticated, graded and certified by Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS) in June 2004:
1804 $10 Plain 4, PCGS PR 64 Cameo
1834 $5 Classic Head, PCGS PR 65 Cameo
1834 $2.50 Classic Head, PCGS PR 64 Cameo
1804 $1 Class 1, PCGS PR 67
1834 Half Dollar, PCGS PR 65
1834 Quarter Dollar, PCGS PR 65
1834 Dime, PCGS PR 67
1834 Half Dime, PCGS PR 66
1834 Large Cent, PCGS PR 66 Red/Brown
1834 Half Cent, PCGS PR 66 Red/Brown
1833 Andrew Jackson gold medal, PCGS PR 63 Cameo

The King of Siam coin set was exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in 1983 and for a year at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas when it opened in 1999.Contursi plans to publicly exhibit the King of Siam set at the Long Beach, California Coin, Stamp & Collectibles Expo in February. Earlier this year, Contursi paid $3 million to buy the first gold coin made in the United States, a unique 1787-dated "Brasher Doubloon," and he also owns what is believed by many experts to be the first silver dollar struck by the United States Mint in 1794.

Some information about Anna Leonowens, the long time owner of the King of Siam proof set and tutor to the future King of Siam



Anna Leonowens, the Chameleon of Siam by Ciaran Conliffe

In 1862, a woman named Anna Leonowens ran a small school for the children of British officers in Singapore. She was, or so she said, the widow of a British major. She had been born as Anna Crawford in Wales in 1834, the daughter of Captain Thomas Crawford. When she was 6 her father died in a Sikh uprising, while she was at school in Wales. Her mother remained in India, and when Anna and her sister completed their education then they were sent out to join her. Anna's mother planned to marry her off to a man twice her age, but Anna was able to avoid this by persuading a clergyman and later renowned travel writer named George Percy Badger to take her with his family on a tour of Egypt and the Holy Land. When she returned she defied her family by marrying a young British captain named Thomas Leonowens. The lived in London for a while, and had four children during their ten years of marriage. Of these the first two died in infancy, but the second two, a daughter named Avis and a son named Louis, survived. When Thomas was promoted to Major and posted to Singapore the family went with him. Anna was at this time dependent on her husband financially, as her inheritance from her father had been lost in the Indian Rebellion. Thus when he died of sunstroke during a tiger hunt she was left with no means of support, and was forced to turn to teaching to maintain herself. Then in 1862, she received an offer that changed her life.

Or rather, changed her life once again, for Anna had already changed her life herself once. The background she had created for herself in Singapore was a falsehood shot through with truths, cherrypicking those parts of her life she treasured while replacing the parts she would rather forget with a heroic fantasy. Rather than being born in Wales to a British officer, Anna had been born in India as Anna Edwards, the daughter of a British corporal. Her mother was not from an old Welsh family, but rather was the mixed-race child of a British officer and a native woman. Anna's own mixed racial heritage was a secret she would take to the grave and beyond. Though she did return to Britain to attend school, it was in Middlesex rather than in Wales. And though it was true she had travelled with the Badger family in the Middle East, she did not marry Captain Thomas Leonowens on her return, but rather Thomas Leon Owens, a childhood friend who worked as a clerk. The couple spent the early years of their marriage not in London, but in Perth, Australia. Thomas found it difficult to find work, and Anna supplemented their income by teaching. After travelling around Australia the family eventually moved to Pengang, where Thomas died of a sudden stroke in 1859. Left widowed, Anna moved to Singapore and turned back to teaching, reinventing herself in order to be a more appealing prospect to the respectable officer's wives of Singapore. (While she was at it she shaved three years off her age, moving her birth year of 1831 to 1834, and totally cut ties with her sister Eliza's family.) Though her school was not a great success, it did serve to prove that she was a good teacher. Thus in 1862 the Siamese consul approached her with the offer of work.


King Mongkut and Prince Chulalongkorn in Naval Uniforms

King Mongkut of Siam (the country nowadays known as Thailand) wished to give his children (all 82 of them) a Western education, as he felt it would offer them the best advantage in the modern world. Unfortunately their current teacher, an American missionary named Dan Beach Bradley, was too religious for the King's taste. He was a devout Buddhist, having been a monk before taking the crown, and had no wish to see his children convert to a foreign religion. Anna was sounded out by the consul, a prominent local businessman named Tan Kim Ching, and found to be sufficiently secular and grounded for the King's purposes. So the offer was made, and after considering it Anna accepted. With the stipend from the royal court she sent Avis off to a boarding school in London, while she and Louis packed their bags and headed for Bangkok. Of course, the offer had been made to Anna based on the fictional persona she had invented, and so she was forced to adopt it entirely for the rest of her life. So successful was she in this that her own children grew up believing that their father had been an officer and their mother was Welsh. It would be over a century before the truth came to light.

The events of Anna's stay in Bangkok are to this day a matter of some debate. Anna would later (as we shall see) produce her own version of events, while the Thai authorities would produce a much different one. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. The bare bones are simple enough - Anna spent nearly six years in the court, teaching the king's children and on occasion serving as a secretary for him by writing letters in English. She was by all accounts a good teacher, and the future King Chulalongkorn, one of her pupils, remembered her fondly afterwards. She was not close with the other Europeans (mostly missionaries) in the court, though they admired her for her persistence in the face of the institutionalized misogyny and lack of respect she faced from the officials. In 1868 she took ill, and went on holiday to England to recover. Before she could return to Bangkok the King died, and his son, the aforementioned Chulalongkorn, sent her a letter thanking her for her service, and politely dismissing her from the court.

Once again without financial support, Anna headed across the Atlantic to New York. There she taught for a while, but soon found that her stories of life in exotic climes were a more profitable line of work. She began writing for Atlantic Monthly, a prestigious literary magazine with a liberal bent. This suited her temperament admirably. Emboldened by this foray into writing, Anna decided to write a memoir of her life in the Siamese court. This book, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, was a considerable success and raised Anna into the literary circle of New York writers. Though the book would face later criticism for exaggerating Anna's role at court (as well as numerous inaccuracies) it was taken at face value at the time. The sequel, a collection of tales entitled The Romance of the Harem is even more exaggerated, and a particular detail about King Mongkut having one of his concubines tortured and executed was considered particularly objectionable by the Siamese authorities. On the other hand, the portrayal of members of the harem as effectively confined slaves was a stark and welcome contrast to the often romanticised view of what was effectively sexual slavery. Taken as a piece of social fiction in the same vein as Charles Dickens, The Romance of the Harem gives a uniquely valuable perspective - a female viewpoint of the institutions that were so rarely scrutinised with empathy for those confined by them.

Regardless of the doubts around the facts portrayed in her novels, they were popular enough to get Anna onto the lecture circuit in New York. In these lectures she focused on the plight of women in these Oriental societies, though she did not neglect criticising the role of slave labour there either. In an America where slavery had been a common institution within living memory, and where women's suffrage was becoming an increasingly heated topic of debate, her lectures struck decidedly close to home. The cash these lectures brought in came too late for her son Louis, and he fled America ahead of his debtors in 1874. Louis returned to Siam where he had grown up, and through the grace of his mother's former pupil King Chulalongkorn received a position as an officer in the royal cavalry. In 1884 he left the royal service to start an import and export business. He married the daughter of the British Consul-General, and those connections combined with his royal friendship were sufficient to ensure his business thrived. In fact, it's still going today as Louis T Leonowens Ltd.

In the meantime, Anna's daughter Avis began courting a young Scottish-born stockbroker named Thomas Fyshe. In 1875 Thomas accepted a position in the Bank of Nova Scotia, which led to a temporary separation when he moved to Halifax in Canada to take up the post. Within a year he became general manager of the bank, and in 1878 he returned to New York to marry Avis. Following the wedding the two returned to Halifax. Anna taught in New York for a while, then went on a tour of the world that took her as far afield as Russia where she covered the aftermath of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II for the Boston magazine Youth's Companion. The magazine offered her an editorial position but instead she settled in Halifax where her grandchildren were being born and where she helped establish a school of art and design. In 1893 she and Avis took the children to Germany for five years to broaden their education, and on her return Anna became exceptionally active in the suffragette movement in Halifax. In 1897 while on a trip to London she was re-united with King Chulalongkorn. The reunion was a friendly one, though the king did take the opportunity to comment on the inaccuracies in her books. By now they had been largely forgotten, however, and when Anna died in 1915 aged 85 (though the world still thought she was 82) it was her contributions to the cultural life of Halifax and Montreal (her home after 1901) that she was remembered for.

Nearly thirty years after Anna died, an American author and former missionary to Thailand named Margaret Landon published a book called Anna and the King of Siam. Margaret had heard stories of Anna while she was living in Thailand, and when she returned to the US in 1937 she began researching for the book. She enhanced Anna's narrative with her own knowledge of Thai customs, adding a definitive sense of time and place to Anna's occasionally dry and didactic prose. Taking some artistic license, she also added a fictionalised element of unconsummated romance to the relationship between Anna and Mongkut, as well as introducing some of the tales from The Romance of the Harem as events that occurred to Anna. The book was a smash hit, and sold over a million copies. A film was produced in 1946, and in 1950 Rodgers and Hammerstein optioned the rights to produce the musical The King and I. The musical was even more of a hit than the book, running on Broadway for three years and spawning its own film adaptation starring Deborah Kerr as Anna and Yul Brynner as Mongkut. More films and adaptations appeared over the years.

Though the fictionalised version of Anna created by Margaret Landon soon became much more well known than the original, most were aware that the historical Anna was a different creature from her fictional counterpart. That the historical Anna was in many ways just as much of a fiction was not known, or even suspected, until the 1970s. The unlikely discoverer of the truth about Anna was an arachnologist named William Syer Bristowe, who originally set out to write a biography of her son Louis. When he tried to find Louis' birth certificate in London (where Anna had told him Louis had been born), Bristowe was unable to find any record of Louis or Avis. Turning to Louis' father, he was also unable to find anything in army records mentioning Thomas Leonowens ever having been a member of the armed forces. His curiosity piqued, Bristowe travelled to India and began an exhaustive process of research, eventually discovering the truth about Anna's origins. Bristowe may have gone too far in the opposite direction (discounting the trip with the Badger family, for example, as another fabrication) but it was his scholarship that finally pierced a veil far thicker than any worn by the harem ladies Anna had written of. And yet, in her reinvention of her past, Anna freed herself from a social debt that would have bound her just as strongly as any of those ladies were bound. Anna was able to be the person she always wanted to be - a good mother and grandmother, who raised her voice in defence of the downtrodden, because she had seen what life under the heel could be like. May we all have the courage to be so free.

numismatic student-




This is an original Puck political cartoon which is depicting the repeal of the silver standard, represented by the coin tidal wave.
I believe you collect items such as this.
Its $31 on ebay right now.

I'm not the seller, just thinking you may want this.

A 1846 Proof Set

Lovely!

Nice coin...just can't get my mind to love that much tone. But toning aside nice coin