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The Shadow of Weng-Chiang
(David A. McIntee) |
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 Name: Hsien-Ko Chang
Format:
Book
Time of Origin: Confronted The Doctor
in Shanghai in 1937.
Appearances: "The
Shadow of Weng-Chiang"
Doctors: Fourth
Doctor
Companions: K9 and 1st Romana
History: Hsien-Ko Chang is in many ways one of
The Doctor’s most tragic adversaries, as she had the potential
to be an ally and a great asset to the world were it not for the
fact that she was motivated primarily by her desire for revenge against
a man who had died over four decades before The Doctor met her. The
daughter of Li H’sen Chang - the Chinese peasant who discovered
the time-travelling despot Magnus
Greel upon his arrival in 1872
- Hsien-Ko was unintentionally rendered immortal due to her father’s
exposure to the zygma energy Greel used to power his time cabinet,
the energy leaving her sterile while also irradiating her cells with
chronon energy and significantly slowing the aging process (It was
never specified if she simply aged normally until a certain point
and then stopped or merely aged slowly). Thanks to her father’s
access to the technological secrets of Magnus Greel, combined with
her own natural intellect, Hsien-Ko swiftly became a genius in various
fields far in advance of most of her contemporaries.
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| Magnus Greel |
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Hsien-Ko
was also responsible for discovering a highly intriguing side-effect
of Magnus Greel’s use of his Time Cabinet. Due to Greel’s
zygma beam having intersected with Earth’s telluric current,
the zygma beam created teleportation ‘paths’ - known
as the Dragon Paths - by sending ripples of chronon energy along
them, Hsien-Ko’s chronon-irradiated blood providing her followers
with a means of accessing these paths for near-instantaneous teleportation
across the globe thanks to the chronon sources being aligned. Aided
by this ‘gift’, Hsien-Ko was able to rise to a position
of command in the Tong of the Black Scorpion, although she was always
tormented by her inability to have children and the knowledge that
those she loved would die before her. A particularly significant
relationship at this time was her bond with her second in command
Kwok, the two having fallen deeply in love only a short while after
their first meeting, although Hsien-Ko refused to actually marry
him until she had completed her work and punished Greel for his actions;
throughout their time together, Kowk regularly demonstrated an almost
fanatical devotion to her, once or twice even disobeying her orders
in the belief that he was helping her, although she always assured
him that she knew what she was doing.
Despite
all her varied accomplishments in this time- one of the more questionable
being her reactivation of the Peking Homunculus ‘Mr Sin’,
using the protoype command circuit to replace the one The Doctor
had destroyed and acquiring substitute pig brain matter from the
local slaughterhouses after the original decayed-, Hsien-Ko was constantly
driven by a need for revenge against Greel for what he had done to
her father, believing that only The Doctor’s intervention had
allowed Chang to die with dignity. To this end, Hsien-Ko intended
to amplify the power of the Dragon Paths where they intersected at
the sacred mountain of T’ai Shan - the location where Greel
had originally arrived - using a nuclear power plant she had developed
from stolen Japanese supplies to enhance the natural piezoelectric
energy of the mountain. The enhanced power would create a chronon
feedback that would short out the zygma beam and release fifty years’ worth
of energy, turning the Dragon Paths into a means of travelling in
time as well as space… simultaneously drawing Greel’s
time cabinet to 1937 by disrupting the beam before it could reach
its original termination point. Having ‘rescued’ Greel,
Hsien-Ko intended to capture him, forcing him to live for all eternity
in a near-death state; based on her father’s diaries, she had
redesigned Greel’s extraction chamber to draw life energy from
even small animals, intending to trap Greel in an isolated area where
passing animals would keep him at just the point of death while unable
to escape or die.
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| Mr Sin |
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The Doctor eventually came in contact with
Hsien-Ko in 1937 while he was searching for the Key to Time with Romana
and K9, the tracer for the Key’s segments being drawn off-course
due to chronon energy generated by the Dragon Paths preventing the tracer
from getting a lock on the fourth segment after discovering the third
on Earth ("The
Stones of Blood"). Tracking the chronon energy
to Shanghai, The Doctor and Romana found Hsien-Ko and her men engaged
in a deal at the docks, Hsien-Ko instantly recognising The Doctor from
her father’s diaries. Aided by vigilante Yan Cheh - really nightclub
owner Woo seeking to help the people of Shanghai against their corrupt
government -, The Doctor and Romana deduced Hsien-Ko’s plan and
the nature of the Dragon Paths, Hsien-Ko leaving them alive in the hopes
that she could use their more advanced knowledge to improve her own work.
Although she believed The Doctor would side with her, he instantly rejected
Hsien-Ko’s plan when he learned about it; putting aside his obvious
moral objections to her actions, by drawing Greel into the present she
would be creating a temporal paradox that could effectively negate her
entire existence, as she would only be ‘saving’ Greel by
using information she had acquired due to Greel’s time in the past,
simultaneously cancelling out her original ‘infection’ by
the zygma energy and creating a highly dangerous temporal paradox.
Outraged at The Doctor’s accusations that she was
just like Greel, sacrificing innocents in the name of her own ‘genius’,
Hsien-Ko had him locked up as the reactor began to build power towards
the moment when Greel would be drawn off-course. Fortunately, an
attack on Sin by a traitor in the Tong disrupted Hsien-Ko’s
control over him, the subsequent battle as Sin slaughtered the Tong
soldiers indiscriminately damaging the reactor, forcing Hsien-Ko
to allow The Doctor to repair it to prevent a nuclear explosion… only
to learn that it was too late to stop Greel’s cabinet from
being drawn to the present. As Hsien-Ko and Kwok awaited Greel’s
arrival, The Doctor and Romana were forced to use the TARDIS - Hsien-Ko
having brought it to her base, having deduced that it was The Doctor’s ‘Time
Cabinet’ -, The Doctor using the TARDIS to ‘shove’ the
Cabinet back on course… only for the resulting temporal feedback
as the zygma beam was short-circuited to completely vaporise Hsien-Ko,
although all memory of her remained as the zygma beam wasn’t
a closed loop and the chronons only affected her. Although Kwok vowed
revenge on The Doctor for the death of Hsien-Ko, he has never confronted
The Doctor again after The Doctor’s departure to resume the
search for the Key to Time. |
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