The Blue Lotus - Method Change

Method Change

Up to the writing of The Blue Lotus, Hergé's writing was mainly based on popular prejudice and on what his mentor, the abbot Norbert Wallez, had told him about Socialism, the Soviet Union, Belgian colonies in Africa or the United States, which was depicted as a nation of gangsters and cowboys and Indians of the sort found in Hollywood movies (though Hergé does sympathise with the Indians in the way they are forced off their land).

As Tintin was published in Le Petit Vingtième, a newspaper supplement, and Hergé announced at the end of Cigars that his next setting would be China. Father Gosset, chaplain to the Chinese students at the University of Leuven, wrote to Hergé urging him to be sensitive about what he wrote about China, since it might offend his Chinese students. Hergé agreed, and in the spring of 1934 Gosset introduced him to Zhang Chongren/Chang Ch'ung-jen (known to Hergé as 'Chang Chong-chen'), a young sculpture student at the Brussels Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. The two young artists quickly became close friends, and Zhang introduced Hergé to Chinese culture, and the techniques of Chinese art.

As a result of this experience, Hergé would strive in The Blue Lotus, and in subsequent Tintin adventures, to be meticulously accurate in depicting the places which Tintin visited by painstakingly researching all his topics. When his UK publisher complained that The Black Island depicted an old-fashioned England, Hergé sent Bob de Moor to Britain to redraw anything that was no longer accurate, resulting in huge changes to the album. This new-found commitment to accuracy would become a Hergé trademark.

As a token of appreciation, he added a fictional "Chang" ("Tchang" in French) to The Blue Lotus, a young Chinese boy who meets and befriends Tintin. Hergé lets Tintin explain to Chang that Chang's fear for the 'white devils' is based on prejudice and Chinese racism. He then recites a few Western stereotypes of the Chinese, confuting them.