The Lost Museum Archive

Chang and Eng Bunker were born in Siam (now Thailand) of Chinese parents and brought to the United States at the age of 17 by sea captain Abel Coffin in 1829. Over the next decade they toured all over North America, Europe, the Caribbean and Central America. In 1832, the conjoined twins left Coffin and thereafter managed their own careers as a touring curiosity until they earned enough money to purchase a plantation in North Carolina and retired. Although they had minimal dealings with Barnum, he displayed a wax figure of the twins in the American Museum, published a pamphlet on their lives, and publicly associated himself with the brothers. This photograph shows them with their wives, the Yates sisters and two of their children.