This is an interesting discussion. Just to clarify, are you saying Tauri Hessia was farther away than Eastern Europe because it took them a whole night to fly into that country? Agatha Christie wrote They Came to Baghdad at about the same time, and in that book, it takes the protagonist a couple of days to fly from London to Baghdad, and she also had a stop-over in Cairo. This is a reliable account because Christie wrote from experience. Today it wouldn't take more than a few hours to cover that same distance. So given that the adventurers flew only overnight to Tauri Hessia, I would imagine the country was somewhere fairly close in Europe.dsr wrote: I tended to assume the country was much more Eastern, perhaps Burma/Thailand type of country. Though that's no doubt based on my then lack of knowledge of those countries. Certainly I never had any impression it was European - too close.
I never thought the country was in SE Asia (Burma/Thailand). I have been in that part of the world, and the culture described in Circus, though of course purely fictitious, doesn't resemble the culture of SE Asia in any way. How would you feel about Central Asia - Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan etc.? Though again, I am pretty sure they are farther than Baghdad, and would likely take at least that amount of time to fly in.
I don't know how many Tintin fans are there on this forum, but the description of Tauri Hessia always reminded me of the country in King Ottakar's Sceptre, and that was definitely meant to be Eastern Europe.
In Thailand, even today, English is not spoken much. So yes, in the 1950s, it would have been very uncommon. But again, as I said, the culture described doesn't sound to me like SE Asia at all.dsr wrote:As for English speaking, it wasn't all that common in Eastern Europe in 1952. (Don't know about Burma or Thailand, but I'm sure it was less common than it is now.) Until World War 2 (1939-1945) the second language in many eastern European countries, and also Scandinavia, was German; after the war, Scandinavia switched to English but Eastern Europe were made to learn Russian.