When Tintin is on his new adventure in Shanghai,
He secretely follows Mitsuhirato, a Japanese spy and owner of the Blue Lotus
to a place outside of the city.
There he witnesses an explosion.
Mitsuhirato and two other gangsters blew up the train track to Shanghai
and seconds later they put the blame on Chinese bandits.
The event that was depicted in "The Blue Lotus" is in fact based on a true story.
An event known as The Manchurian Incident
The Blue Lotus
This comic was originally published in 1934 to 1935
and it contained a lot of information about China, that the western world was simply not aware of.
So what's different in this comic compared to Tintin's former adventures
is that Hergé finally didn’t use stereotypes and in fact paid more attention on telling the story as accurate as possible.
And thanks to the help of his Chinese friend Chang, or Zhang Chong Ren,
who was an arts student in Belgium,
he learned about Chinese culture and also about the Manchurian Incident,
which is also known as the „Mukden Incident“ or in Chinese "jiu yi ba shibian", which means 9/18 Incident.
On September 18 in 1931, the Japanese detonated a small amount of dynamite
close to a railway line to Shenyang that was owned by Japan.
Compared to "The Adventures of Tintin",
the railway line was barely damaged and a train passed over it just a few minutes later.
The Japanese blamed Chinese troups as a pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria.
The region was important for Japan, because it was rich in natural resources and they could gain politcal power.
This false flag event was soon exposed and led to Japans resignation from the League of Nations in March 1933.
In 1939, Soong Mei-Ling, the wife of political leader Chiang Kai-Shek invited Herge to visit them.
Hergé wasn’t able to do so, because of the upcoming World War II. He finally visited her in Taiwan in 1973.