Year: 1933

Important Characters: Tintin, Snowy, The Thompsons, Chang, Rastapopoulos, Dawson

French Title: Le Lotus Bleu

The Blue Lotus marked a turning point in Hergé's portrayal of Tintin's adventures. In the previous books, his descriptions of the countries Tintin visited was assembled from common clichés. Now he was to seriously worry about the accuracy of his portrayals. Behind this transformation was one of the most significant meetings Hergé ever had.

The previous adventure had been left open for Hergé to send Tintin to the Far East to continue his investigations. He was warned by the chaplain to the Chinese students at the University of Louvain to be careful with his portrayal of China, and to do some research. The chaplain put him in touch with a young Chinese student, Chang Chong-Chen. The two had lengthy discussions about many subjects, and Chang taught Hergé much about the history and culture of his nation. Hergé later admitted that this was an education for him: "For me up to then, China was peopled by a vague, slit-eyed people who were very cruel, who would eat swallows' nests, wear pig-tails and throw children into rivers."

Never again was Hergé to rely on the writings of others when devising Tintin's adventures. He was so influenced by his meetings with Chang that he named a character in the adventure after him. Chang is the one real friend Tintin meets and there is one memorable section where Tintin details Hergé's changing opinions on the Chinese.

Hergé's new found attention to detail made this adventure by far the most politically involved of all the Tintin adventures. The Sino-Japanese War was then raging, and Hergé portrays the situation with such accuracy that one could treat The Blue Lotus as a history textbook. The section where Chinese bandits are blamed for an attack deliberately perpetrated by the Japanese is a transposition of the incident on the Moukden railway which gave Japanese troops an excuse to invade Chinese territory.

Hergé took a deliberately pro-Chinese stance in the book. He denounced the role of the Western powers in the conflict. The book is illustrated with Chinese ideograms, drawn by the real Chang, encouraging the boycott of Japanese goods and attacking imperialism. This courage was far from popular. The book brought protests from Japanese delegates in Brussels and there was much opposition to its publication.