BRIAN ZHANG · CHINESE CONJURING

The world remembered “Chinese magic,”
but forgot the artists behind it.

I am a seventh-generation inheritor of Chinese Conjuring from Tianjin. Through performance, reinvention, and historical documentation, I am carrying this living tradition into a new international chapter.

View Selected WorkDiscover the Lineage

CULTURAL EXCHANGE · REPRESENTATION · LINEAGE

Selected Credentials

Brian Zhang giving a televised interview at the Third National Festival of Young Ambassadors in Haikou.
Brian Zhang speaking into a microphone during the Young Ambassadors national showcase in Haikou.
Brian Zhang performing Chinese Conjuring with two blue-and-white porcelain bowls at the national showcase.

01 / 04

National Showcase Representative

Young Ambassadors for International People-to-People Exchange · Haikou, July 2022

At twelve, I was invited to the Third National Showcase of Young Ambassadors for International People-to-People Exchange, organized by the Ministry of Education’s China Centre for International People-to-People Exchange. Performing before a global audience, I began using traditional Chinese conjuring not simply to create wonder, but to articulate my cultural identity and help others come closer to China.

Brian Zhang presenting Chinese Conjuring at the Embassy of Nepal in Beijing.
Brian Zhang among Chinese and Nepalese participants holding both countries’ flags at the embassy cultural exchange.
Studio portrait of Brian Zhang in a green robe, holding an open fan behind a traditional conjuring table.

02 / 04

Embassy Cultural Exchange Delegate

“Sing a Song Together” for the Hangzhou Asian Games · Embassy of Nepal in China, March 2023

At thirteen, I performed the performance Wanli Guicang at the Embassy of Nepal in China during an Asian Games cultural-exchange initiative jointly launched by HAGOC and the Ministry of Education’s people-to-people exchange center. As diplomats and students gathered around the performance, Chinese Conjuring became a language requiring no translation: strangers smiled, spoke, and became curious about one another.

Junior Cultural Ambassador recipients and organizers gathered onstage at the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation ceremony.
Brian Zhang wearing his Junior Cultural Ambassador sash before the ceremony’s event screen.

03 / 04

Junior Cultural Ambassador

“My Favorite Chinese Art” · China Soong Ching Ling Foundation, Beijing, March 2023

At thirteen, I was named a Junior Cultural Ambassador by the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation. From 457 submissions across 41 countries, 30 recipients received the title. The recognition affirmed my belief that cultural exchange begins not with grand declarations, but by learning one tradition deeply and presenting it with enough integrity to move beyond borders.

Brian Zhang watching a ceremonial scroll presentation during his formal apprenticeship in Tianjin.
Brian Zhang, at far right, with his master and fellow Chinese Conjuring performers surrounded by traditional props.

04 / 04

Seventh-Generation Representative Inheritor of Conjuring

Formal Apprenticeship & Lineage Recognition · Tianjin, August 2023

At fourteen, I formally became a disciple of Master Yang Xiaolei. I am a seventh-generation Representative Inheritor of Chinese Conjuring and a member of the Tianjin Acrobats Association. This was not an honor to display and consider complete. It was a responsibility passed into my hands: to preserve an ancient art while helping it remain alive, human, and meaningful to audiences today.

Ching Ling Foo and Harry Houdini standing together in a historical photograph in 1912

Two magicians stand together in an old photograph.

Which man do you recognize?

Chapter 1 · The Stranger in the Photograph

The Magician America Remembered Backwards

How one of America’s most valuable performers became a stranger in his own story

Buffalo Courier salary list showing Ching Ling Foo at 1,046 dollars a week and Houdini at 150 dollars a week

“How Salaries Have Leaped,” Buffalo Courier, March 10, 1918.Source

Most American viewers recognize Harry Houdini. Few recognize the man beside him.

Yet a theater ledger later cited by the Buffalo Courier listed Houdini at $150 a week—and the other magician at $1,046.

The point is not to diminish Houdini. It is to recover the scale of Foo’s own stature.

How did the Chinese magician who was once worth nearly seven times as much become the stranger in the photograph?

Ching Ling Foo and Harry Houdini, 1912. Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, LC-USZ62-112393.Source

Chapter 2

Wonder Under Exclusion

Three performers from Ching Ling Foo’s company around 1898
Members of Ching Ling Foo’s company, c. 1898.Source

His name was Zhu Liankui, known across the West as Ching Ling Foo.

At the height of the Chinese Exclusion era, Foo stepped onto American stages in long embroidered robes. From their seemingly empty folds came enormous porcelain bowls filled with water, living goldfish, blazing braziers, and objects too large to have been concealed anywhere.

American audiences had seen stage magic. Foo made them feel that the laws of matter had briefly changed.

But behind the spectacle was a more painful performance.

During the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, Foo’s ten-year-old son died. A contemporary newspaper described him wearing the white emblem of Chinese mourning, burning incense before the child’s body—and then returning to the stage because the performance still had to continue.

He produced wonder for an audience while carrying grief it could not see.

America welcomed the fantasy of “mysterious Chinese magic.” The Chinese artist himself entered a country that was actively restricting people who looked like him. When immigration authorities later attempted to expel members of his company, Foo fought through the American legal system for the right to remain.

He was celebrated, exoticized, restricted—and still indispensable.

Source Source

Chapter 3

When the Copy Replaced the Original

Ching Ling Foo wearing Chinese stage costume in a historical portrait

CHING LING FOO

Zhu Liankui

Chinese artist

William Ellsworth Robinson performing as Chung Ling Soo

CHUNG LING SOO

William Ellsworth Robinson

American impersonator

Foo’s success soon produced another kind of illusion.

William Ellsworth Robinson, an American magician, darkened his appearance, adopted pseudo-Chinese clothing, stopped speaking onstage, and reinvented himself as Chung Ling Soo—a name almost indistinguishable from Ching Ling Foo. He presented himself not as an interpreter of Chinese performance, but as a Chinese magician with an invented biography.

The imitation was so complete that many Western audiences never knew Robinson was American.

In 1905, Foo publicly challenged him to reproduce ten of his feats. Robinson arrived before the press. Foo did not appear. Why remains uncertain—but Robinson controlled the story that followed.

Foo lost one encounter.Robinson gained the power to narrate their history.

Over time, the copy became a legend. The original became a footnote.

Source

Chapter 4

What Survived

His name survived.
Ching Ling Foo Outdone (1900) is not footage of Ching Ling Foo’s performance. It is an early trick film that borrowed his name. Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.Source

The Library of Congress preserves a 1900 film titled Ching Ling Foo Outdone. Ching Ling Foo himself does not appear in it. His name had already become shorthand for a spectacle that others could imitate.

That survival feels almost too perfect: the copy remained visible while the Chinese artist receded.

But he never disappeared completely.

A photograph. A salary ledger. An immigration case. A newspaper account of a grieving father who stepped back onto the stage. Together, they reveal not a mysterious Oriental character, but a formidable artist negotiating fame, exclusion, loss, and historical erasure.

America did not forget “Chinese magic.”

It forgot the Chinese artist who had helped make it famous.

Brian Zhang performing Chinese Conjuring, surrounded by traditional stage props and holding a flaming basin

Chapter 5

The Line Reaches Me

The last name on this lineage chart is mine.

But I do not see it as the end of a completed family tree. I see it as unfinished work. Every line marks a moment when one person stood before another and placed a lifetime of technique, judgment, and responsibility into a new pair of hands. Now, those hands are mine.

Northern Chinese Conjuring Lineage

中国北派传统戏法师承谱系

Master Disciple

Direct lineage in red · Ching Ling Foo in charcoal · Scroll for collateral branches

At five, I knew only that a deck of cards could bring strangers closer. Years later, when I formally became a disciple of Master Yang Xiaolei, I began to understand what I had truly inherited. It was not only the craft of producing porcelain basins, glass fishbowls, and blazing fire from the folds of a single robe. It was a language through which generations of Chinese artists had met the world, studied human nature, and created wonder with an audience.

More than a century ago, at the height of the Chinese Exclusion era, Ching Ling Foo carried this art across the Pacific and brought American audiences to their feet for a Chinese performer. Yet history preserved the spectacle of “Chinese magic” more readily than the names of the Chinese artists who created it.

Now that this lineage has reached me, that is no longer only a question about Foo’s place in history. It has become my responsibility:

When an art form is seen around the world, yet the people who created it are gradually forgotten, what should the next generation do?

My answer is not to seal the tradition behind glass. I want to perform and reimagine its repertoire, trace its scattered images and archival records, and document its lineages in English. I want those encountering Chinese Conjuring for the first time to see more than a collection of “ancient secrets.” I want them to see real Chinese artists who carried wonder through war, exclusion, and oblivion—and placed it, still alive, into my hands.

Today, algorithms compete for every second of our attention, while machines can generate spectacle at an unprecedented scale. Yet real magic still occurs in the shared presence of human beings: a glance, a silence, a breath held together, an instant of wonder that cannot be reproduced. It reminds us that attention is not merely something to capture. It can also be something we give. Even as our tools grow more powerful, we still need to see one another.

My ambition is to make the world see Chinese Conjuring for a second time.

This time, not only the wonder, but the people who created it. Not a faceless idea of “Chinese magic,” but the names of the Chinese artists who first carried it into the world.

And now, under my own name, I will carry that line forward.

Sources & Image Credits
  1. Library of Congress photograph record. View record ↗Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, LC-USZ62-112393.
  2. “How Salaries Have Leaped,” Buffalo Courier, March 10, 1918. View newspaper record ↗The local clipping reproduces the paper’s 1900 salary list; the online record is the Library of Congress newspaper directory, not a scan of this issue.
  3. University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Trans-Mississippi & International Exposition archive. View archive ↗Wakefield Scrapbook Volume 06; World-Herald: Omaha, August 1, 1898.
  4. United States v. Ching Ling Foo et al., U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Criminal Docket Books, vol. 4, case 2989, April 26, 1899, National Archives, Chicago. View research citation ↗This is the verified docket title for the proceeding requested as “In re Ching Ling Foo.”
  5. Members of Ching Ling Foo’s company, c. 1898. View record ↗
  6. Historical postcard portrait of Ching Ling Foo from his 1898 U.S. show. View record ↗Public-domain archival reproduction.
  7. State Library Victoria, Chung Ling Soo collection material. View record ↗
  8. Library of Congress film record, Ching Ling Foo Outdone (1900). View record ↗Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.