If an American writer like Bacon could view Pinklao’s clothing as a metaphor for Siam’s social transformation, then the Second King’s son, Prince George Washington, was an even more potent political symbol. There is some disagreement about whether Pinklao named Wichaichan “George Washington” himself, or if it was the work of a patriotic American missionary. In The English Governess at the Siamese Court, Anna Leonowens claims that “an American missionary, who was on terms of intimacy with the father, named the child ‘George Washington’”, and in an obituary for Wichaichan printed in the Baptist Missionary Magazine, author and missionary Fannie Roper Feudge claims that she “had the honor of naming the royal babe… and as the father had requested that the name selected should combine that of an English king and an American president, ‘George Washington’ was chosen”. It is unlikely that Wichaichan would have been given this nickname without his father’s explicit approval, but it is possible that Feudge or another American missionary may have suggested Washington as a suitable name for the young Siamese prince. If this is the case it would be consistent with how American writers in the nineteenth century used the iconic image of George Washington to think about the United States’ increasing contact with exotic and distant lands and peoples. Because he was such a definitive and recognizable symbol of the United States itself, Washington was the perfect figure for expressing concern over what might happen to the American character if it came into contact with a foreign “other”.