In The Adventures of Tintin, the Blue Lotus suit Pharaoh’s Cigars whose plot it unravels – but above all it precedes, beyond the decades, Tintin au Tibetthe story of the little reporter convinced that his Chinese friend from Blue Lotus did not die in a plane crash. A feeling and a character link the two albums, this famous Chang who has become a symbol of friendship, in fiction as in reality. Tchang Tchong-Jen, born in 1907 like Hergé (but in Shanghai), came to the Beaux-Arts in Brussels and a priest directed Hergé towards him when it came to working on what was then The Adventures of Tintin reporter in the Far East. Tchang will give information and help with posters or speech bubbles, “and we will wonder if Hergé was well informed of everything that Tchang had calligraphed on his boards, including the vengeful slogans addressed by the young artist to the invader of his country”writes Philippe Goddin in the preface to the reissue of the colorized version of Blue Lotus from 1936. Conversely, it is Chang himself who is seated next to Snowy and Tintin when they are hiding at the cinema. In the biography Tchang Tchong-Jen traveling artistTchang Yifei, Tchang’s daughter, and Dominique Maricq note that, when, to obtain the right to publish from the Germans in the 1940s, Hergé had to provide his previous albums, “he deliberately ignored the Church
