Gul-i ābī (tan'tan 5): Persian 1401

This time Tintin will travel to mysterious China. In Shanghai, he discovers the origin of a powerful poison that drives him crazy. There he faces a terrible band of opium traffickers as well as some Japanese agents who keep the reader in suspense until the end of the book. When he finished The Pharaoh's Cigars, Hergé had already announced in Le Petit Vingtième that Tintin was preparing to continue his journey to the Far East. Then he received a letter from Father Gosset, chaplain to the Chinese students at the University of Louvain, in which he advised him to get well informed about China and its culture and introduced him to the young Chinese Zhang-Tsong-Jen, an art student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leuven. They immediately sympathized and became great friends. (We can recognize the young Tsang as the Chinese friend of Tintin.) Thanks to the long conversations with Tsang, Hergé was able to delve into the knowledge of the culture of China, escaping from the clichés about the Chinese then held by the Europeans, absolutely far from reality. The friendship with Tsang would last a lifetime, both in fiction and in real life. This is the first album that Hergé would take on completely, and from which he always documented deeply about the countries where Tintin had to travel.