Abstract
Early in the action of The King and I, Anna gives the King's children a lesson in geopolitics. Seeing an old map of Asia on the wall in which Siam occupies an area roughly the size of China, she rolls out her own visual aid to cover it. Anna's new map is a Mercator projection of the world with Siam reduced to dimensions drawn in London and surrounded by land masses colored to denote the encroachments of European imperial power. The children object to the shrunken size of their kingdom, but their father, the King, commands them to recognize that Anna's version of the world is the correct one. Within the world of the musical, the British map is just as real as snow, which the children also deny; both define natural realities in an external world.
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