Abstract: The Blue Lotus, an episode set in Shanghai of the popular Belgian comic, The Adventures of Tintin, was the result of a collaboration in 1934-35 between Hergé, its creator, and Zhang Chongren, a Shanghai-born art student in Brussels. This paper demonstrates that the key legacy of the comic is its message calling for mutual understanding between different cultures. Despite the considerable amount of literature on The Blue Lotus thanks to the popularity of Tintin, the existing research tends to either mystify or simplify the Hergé-Zhang encounter and its attendant influences. Taking a more contextualized approach to engage the immediate historical and literary background of the comic, this paper focuses on how a cross-cultural dialogue between Hergé and Zhang contributed to the two significant features in The Blue Lotus:raising a voice against injustice in the contemporary Sino-Japanese conflict, and breaking the established framework of cultural stereotypes. It shows that the collaborators' in-depth conversation about different cultures and civilizations functioned not only to provide new knowledge, but also to facilitate an understanding from others' perspectives, with a further analysis of the comic itself to verify this impact. Created on the foundation of a cross-cultural dialogue, this comic in turn became a medium to promote the idea of cultural respect and tolerance to readers of Tintin, which is still relevant today.