König was born near
Kreutzburg in
Polish Livonia, which is now
Krustpils in
Latvia. He was a private pupil of
Carl Linnaeus in 1757, and lived in
Denmark from 1759 to 1767 during which time he examined the plants of Iceland. In 1767 he joined as a medical officer to the
Tranquebar Mission and on his voyage to India, he passed through Cape Town where he met Governor
Rijk Tulbagh with an introduction from Linnaeus, collecting plants in the Table Mountain region from 1 to 28 April 1768. König replaced the position made available following the death of Halle-educated physician
Samuel Benjamin Cnoll (1705–67). In 1774 he took up a better paying position as
naturalist for the
Nawab of Arcot, serving in that position until 1778. In 1773, he received the Doctor's degree
in absentia from the
University of Copenhagen possibly for his studies on indigenous remedies published as
De remediorum indigenorum ad morbes cuivis regioni endemicos expuguandos efficacia. He became naturalist to the Nawab of Arcot in 1774 and embarked on a trip to the mountains north of
Madras and to
Ceylon, a description of which was later published in a Danish scientific journal. On 17 July 1778, König was appointed Naturalist at Madras with the
British East India Company where he remained until his death, undertaking several scientific journeys and working with notable scientists like
William Roxburgh,
Johan Christian Fabricius and Sir
Joseph Banks. König followed the example of the
Moravian South-Asian Mission in Tranquebar in collecting and trading natural history objects on a large scale. Most plants of König and his successors were sent back to Europe and described by
A.J. Retzius,
Roth,
Schrader,
Willdenow,
Martin Vahl and
James Edward Smith. Only Rottler published his own descriptions. König made several visits around the region and perhaps the most notable of his journeys was to Siam and the Malacca Straits in 1778–80, in this period he spent several months studying the flora and fauna in
Phuket. He met
Patrick Russell who arrived in India in 1782 at Tranquebar and the two remained in constant communication. He made trips to the hills near Vellore and Ambur and in 1776 a trip to the Nagori hills with George Campbell. In 1784, he visited Russell at Vizagapatnam on his way to Calcutta. On the way he suffered from dysentery and Roxburgh who was at Samalkota oversaw his treatment. He however did not recover and died at Jagannadhapuram,
Kakinada in 1785. He bequeathed his papers to Sir
Joseph Banks. He described many plants used in
Indian Medicine and kept notes on other aspects of natural history including the termites of southern India and the collection and use of their alates as food. Koenig's collections of insects from southern India may have been used in descriptions by
Fabricius. The plant genus
Koenigia was named for him by
Linnaeus, as was a species of curry-leaf tree
Murraya koenigii. ==References==