Herge first published Le Lotus Bleu in the magazine Le Petit Vingtieme in Brussels in 1934-5: the story itself is set in 1931. At that time Japanese troops were occupying parts of the Chinese mainland, and Shanghai, the great seaport at the mouth of the Yangtze Kiang, possessed an International Settlement, a trading base in China for Western nations, administered by the British and Americans. Herge based his narrattive freely upon the events of the...