Tintin’s real-life Chinese friend: how Hergé’s art and life was influenced by artist Zhang Chongren

The bond between the creator of beloved boy reporter Tintin and a prominent Chinese artist was a meeting of great minds.

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Zhang Chongren points to a poster of Chang Chong-chen, a character in Tintin book The Blue Lotus based on him, in Paris in 1985. The leading Chinese artist and Georges Remi, known as Hergé and author of the books, became firm friends after meeting in the 1930s. Photo: Getty Images

Samuel Porteous

Published: 11:15am, 10 Jun 2023Updated: 11:13am, 5 Jul 2023

Born in 1907 and raised in a Jesuit orphanage in Old Shanghai, artist Zhang Chongren would become one of the greatest sculptors of his era, being called the “the Rodin of the East”.

In the mid-1980s, French cultural authorities even made a cast of his hands, an honour previously bestowed only on Auguste Rodin – considered the founder of modern sculpture – himself, and painter Pablo Picasso.

But what really made Zhang the most famous Chinese person in Europe for much of the 20th century was his remarkable relationship with Georges Remi, creator of the beloved 24-volume comic strip The Adventures of Tintin, now translated into more than 70 languages, with a readership approaching a billion.

By the time Remi, known professionally as Hergé, first met Zhang, in May 1934, Tintin was enormously popular. What had started in 1929 as a roughly drawn comic strip featuring a crusading boy journalist who did not do much journalism, published in the conservative, sometimes fascist-friendly, Catholic Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, had evolved into a fully fledged French-language phenomenon.

Toddler Zhang Chongren at the knee of his silk embroiderer mother. Illustration: Samuel Porteous

However, for all the success of the four Tintin books published until then, in the opinion of most tintinologists Hergé had yet to produce his first true masterpiece.

That would be The Blue Lotus (1935), which took the globe-trotting Tintin to China, where the heroic boy-reporter battles an international opium-smuggling ring in an Old Shanghai upended by the Sino-Japanese conflict of the 1930s.