- Role
- Secondary
- Nickname
- Chinese Charlie
- Profession
- Mining expert
- Birthdate
- Hour of the Dragon, Month of the Rooster, 1832
- Relationship Status
- Married
- Playby
- Victor Sen Yung
- Height
- 5'5
- Build
- Large
- Hair Color
- Black
- Eye Color
- Brown
- Physical Description
Charlie is a short, stout Chinese man.
- Reputation
Slightly mysterious.
- Employment Details
He went to New York City, who knows what he is doing there. He might come back!
- Expertise
He was a civil servant, mining expert and geomancer back in China
- Kith & Kin
All left behind in China.
- Timeline
Born in Xiangxiang, Hunan Province in the year of the Black Dragon (1832), Baoyu was the grandson of Fa Yuping, a farmer with social and political ambitions. He studied in Yuelu Academy in Changsha Prefecture, where he passed the prefectural examination in 1853, only a year after his father, Fa Linshu. He was studying for the provincial examination (juren) when he became caught up in the great Taiping Rebellion and was perforce to join its cause and marry a distant relation of the leader, Hong Xiuquan, in a pseudo Christian ceremony. When the Rebellion was quashed in 1860, he fled to America in (very justified) fear of reprisals.
In America, at first he found only backbreaking work on the railways and in Chinese laundries, but by the late 1860s he had built up enough capital to fit out a mining expedition and ended up that career as one of the 'Would-be Sooners' who were chased from the Black Hills of Dakota by the U.S. Army in 1872. It was there that he met his long time business associate: the American huckster, the late Lorenzo Crabbe.
- Written By
- Javia