Random Things About The Strange Lives Of Chang And Eng Bunker (14 items)

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  (#1) Their Connection Was A Small Piece Of Flesh

  As Chang and Eng grew, their mother encouraged them to exercise and stretch their connecting band as much as they could to give them more mobility. Chang and Eng were quite active and could do much of the same activities that other children could, like swimming and running. Doctors who studied them saw that both boys could feel a pin prick in the center of the band, but as they moved the pin to one side, only one twin would feel it. Chang and Eng could also feel when the other was being tickled, and could taste whenever the other twin ate something sour. 
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  (#2) A British Merchant Plucked Them From Relative Obscurity

  When they were in their early teens, their main role in life was helping their family sell preserved duck eggs in a small fishing village. One day, British merchant Robert Hunter spotted the boys swimming in a river and initially thought they were a strange animal. Although King Rama III wanted to keep the twins in Siam, Hunter was eventually able to bribe him over a span of five years into letting the boys go West. 
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  (#3) Their Appearance Was Considered Somewhat Offensive And Dangerous

  The twins spent about a decade performing around the United States and England. They were skilled performers, able to do flips and other physical feats like picking up very heavy objects. As much as they impressed the public, their reception was not always warm. Some people had concerns in those days before scientific progress, that simply seeing the conjoined twins would have a negative effect on "women of childbearing age." One woman from Kentucky gave birth to stillborn conjoined twins and "claimed she had seen numerous representations of the twins in newspaper advertisements around the time she conceived her children, which affected her imagination.” 
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  (#4) They Went From Being Leased To Owning Slaves

  Chang and Eng's father died when the boys were still quite young, so when their mother was offered $500 to contract the boys into Robert Hunter's care for 30 months, it was a smart decision for their family. Once the twins became legal adults, they were actually making some money from performing. Eventually, they saved a small fortune and built up their own little homestead in North Carolina. Because they were legally considered "white" in the United States, they were able to purchase a few dozen slaves to run it. 
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  (#5) They Married Two (Non-Conjoined) Sisters

  In 1838, they decided to settle down and move to North Carolina. It was there that the twins met sisters Adelaide and Sarah Yates. Chang fell in love with Adelaide and Adelaide with Chang. They wanted to get married, but it was decided that the marriage couldn't go forward without her sister, Sarah, also marrying Eng. Although they were not in love (they just tolerated each other), the marriage went forward anyway. Their father did not initially approve - not because the men were conjoined, but because they were Asian. 
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  (#6) They Had A Large And Unconventional Family

  Although very few of their neighbors approved of their marriages, Chang and Eng seemed to lead a normal, if not logistically mysterious, sex life. Their first children were born only six days apart, and another pair were only eight days apart. They would go on to have 21 children between the two of them - Chang and Adelaide had 10 children while Eng and Sarah had 11. 
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  (#7) The Civil War Interrupted Their Peaceful Plantation Life

  The time period of the Civil War was a rough one for Chang, Eng, and their families. Two of their daughters passed away during the strife. After the Confederacy went down, the twins lost most of their wealth because a lot of it had been tied up in Confederate currency loans. They basically had no choice but to return to touring in Europe with PT Barnum. 
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  (#8) One Took To The Bottle While The Other Did Not

  Chang supposedly took to the bottle much more aggresively after their daughters passed away, although Eng did not follow suit. Scientists and doctors noticed that although they were connected, the effects of the alcohol did not transfer from one twin to the other. Chang's alcoholism affected his health in several ways as they grew older and may have been a contributing factor in his death. 
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  (#9) Eng Helped Chang Recover From Partial Paralysis

  Chang had a stroke that paralyzed his right side in 1870. This made mobility difficult for the twins, and so Eng did his best to accommodate Chang. He made a sling to prop up his right leg. Between the support of his brother and a cane, Chang was able to regain some mobility, though he was never able to fully recover. 
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  (#10) They Changed Their Tune About Separation

  From the beginning, Chang and Eng had never wanted to be separated. They were perfectly happy and knew that any separation process they would endure would be extremely risky and might cost their lives. However, towards the end, their bodies began to age at different rates, causing tension and worry. The thought of having to live with a corpse attached to them began to scare the twins. They actually begged doctors to separate them, but the doctors believed such a procedure would kill them both due to heavy blood loss. The physicians also had no way of knowing what was contained inside their connecting ligament.
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  (#11) They Lived As One And Died The Same Way

  After suffering from ill health and alcoholism for several years, Chang caught a bad cough in 1874 that may have been pneumonia. At one point on January 17th, Eng felt that something was wrong and asked his son to check on his brother. When told he was dead, his response was, "Then I am going." And sure enough, within three hours, Eng had also passed away. His last request was to have his brother's body brought closer to him. 
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  (#12) Their Death Cast Lives On At The Mutter Museum

  After they were declared legally dead, the doctors and scientists who had always been curious about how the twins lived swarmed to get a look inside their mysterious bodies. They were sent to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, where they were autopsied. It was found that their livers were fused, which would have definitely caused major complications if they had chosen to go forward with a separation. A cast was made of their upper bodies after the autopsy was performed, which is still on display in Philadelphia's Mutter Museum. 
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  (#13) Over A Hundred Years After Their Death, Their Fame Became Known In Thailand

  Although the brothers were originally from the Kingdom of Siam (modern-day Thailand), they were never all that well-known there. Knowledge of their existence as performers in the West spread in the 1980s through Thailand, and in 2001, the small town of Samut Songkhram where Chang and Eng were born erected a memorial statue to honor them. It was cast from donated bronze from broken propellers off of fishing boats, appropriate considering the legend that the boys were born on a fishing boat. 
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  (#14) Their Descendants Still Throw Family Reunions

  Chang and Eng's large family gave way to many descendants. They have somewhere around 1,500 in the 21st century, and hundreds of them still get together for family reunions. Other participants at those events have included the Thai ambassador to the United States and descendants of the Bunker's wet nurse, Aunt Grace. There have been plenty of twins born into the family, but none of them have been conjoined. 

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