One aspect of the new Doctor Strange movie that has brought some criticism is the
change of the character of the Ancient One to a woman, and a woman of Celtic origin.

It is generally assumed that the Ancient One was changed so that he would not be
a Tibetan, and that this was done in order to appease authorities in mainland China.

While I don't think that this generalization is _false_, it is somewhat oversimplified, and the real story of the Ancient One character is more complicated.

In the very first stories of Doctor Strange, the character of the Ancient One, although clearly Asian (in the sense of Oriental - not East Indian or anything like that) is otherwise unspecified as to ethnicity. He could well have been initially conceptualized as Han Chinese - the early glimpses we have of the Book of the Vishanti or esoteric scrolls in his possession look like a (fairly crude) artist's conception of Chinese characters - odd squiggles that tend to take up square cells.

At the time, though, some other Marvel comics - particularly Iron Man and Ant Man - had the superheroes directly engaged in fighting the Cold War. So, for consistency with the rest of the comics line, the character did get altered so as to suggest that he was Tibetan, although it wasn't really specified explicitly.

Later on, it became explicit that the Ancient One was not from Tibet, but instead from a small country just outside Tibet that shared its language and ethnicity; something like Bhutan in the real world. Except that it was tiny - like Sikkim, or even tinier; perhaps to Sikkim as Grand Fenwick is to Luxembourg. That country, of course, is Kamar-Taj.

Incidentally, while I think it's just a coincidence, the occult tomes in the Doctor Strange comic, at least during its earlier run, looked even more like Yi writing (before it got simplified for the computer age) than like Chinese.

John Savard

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