Tintin Forums

As I have mentioned in The Cult of Tintin's Yahoo! Group, Commercial Press (Hong Kong) has released its version of traditional Chinese Tintin albums - 3rd licence after Epoch and Taiwan Times - this weekend.

The Hong Kong version uses the French version as its base, unlike the People's Republic of China (PRC) version. In some ways I consider this version better than PRC's.

I might be able to answer all questions related to this version.

I have the The Blue Lotus and Tintin in the Congo in Cantonese. A friend of mine went travelling around China n 2003, and I specifically told him to get me some Chinese Tintin books. I told him to try and get hold of Tintin in [Chinese] Tibet. Unluckily he didn't find a copy, but very luckily brought me back The Blue Lotus and Tintin in the Congo. They are in Cantonese and small (A5).

There was no "Cantonese" version of Tintin until the past weekend. You may mean the small version of PRC Tintin. As a fact, there're no big Tintins in China IIRC.

The covers look good. I particularly like the Kih-Oskh emblem and the crab hidden away inside the Chinese ideograms.

Maybe there in Mandarin then (Im at work so cannot get to them), They are definately in some kind of Chinese and they are small (A5).

Looking on the back covers, I especially like King Ottokar's Sceptre - they've managed to integrate the sceptre itself into the lettering ! Very smart.

rastapopoulos wrote: Maybe there in Mandarin then (Im at work so cannot get to them), They are definately in some kind of Chinese and they are small (A5).

The official mainland Chinese (PRC) edition books printed after 2001, come in A-5 size only. The earlier ones are of the same size as the English edition books.

The PRC and Hong Kong edition books are all in 'Chinese': Mandarin and Cantonese are two of many Chinese dialects, which are spoken, not written languages. Written Chinese, which can be read in any dialect using the local pronunciation, exists in two forms: the traditional characters still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the simplified version used in the PRC and Singapore. The PRC edition Tintin uses simplified characters, and the Hong Kong edition uses traditional characters.

Thanks marsbar,
Sorry for being ignorant. I didnt mean to sound stupid. The editions I have have the usual covers and backs. The Hong Kong editions do look very nicely designed. So I have PRC editions, cool i didnt know. But what does PRC mean? (doh).

People's Republic of China. That is, mainland China rather than Taiwan.