A contract Hunter and Coffin signed with the brothers stipulated that their tour would last for five years,[16] though a rumor later circulated that Chang and Eng's mother had sold them into slavery, a charge that greatly upset the twins.

[22] After leaving the United States they toured major cities in the British Isles, and by the time they returned to New York in March 1831, the twins had gained some skill in English reading, writing, and speaking.

Newspapers reported that they had earned great profits, and their promotional materials began to describe their customers as dignified—though their act of exhibition could seem crude—to help bring more moneyed visitors.

While hunting game, they thought they were being taunted and harassed by over a dozen local men who had approached them, going on to strike a man named Elbridge Gerry with the butt of their gun.

[28] Hale counseled Harris; for example, he could avoid paying a Virginia exhibition tax through careful marketing: he was to call the twins' tour a "business", not a "show".

Hale later said Coffin told him he had met the twins "whoring, gaming, and drinking" and "gave Chang Eng 'the damndest thrashing they ever had in their lives'".

[35] Nonetheless, they were now exclusively referred to by their stage name—the "Siamese twins"—and they did change some parts of their performance, such as by wearing more American clothes, speaking English with the audience, and presenting themselves no longer as "boys" but men.

According to a family friend, their move to Wilkes County, in the northwest of the state, allowed them to "engage in chasing stag and catching trout ... to enjoy the recreation which they had desired to find far away from the hurrying crowds.

Gwyn administered their oath of allegiance; despite a federal law from 1790 restricting naturalization to "free white persons", citizenship was a matter generally governed by local attitudes.

Though national (mainly Northern) newspapers generally condemned the marriages, there was probably little local reaction except purported vandalism of Sarah and Adelaide's parents' house the night before the wedding.

[51] The Bunkers carved a unique place in Americans' perception of race—they were considered nonwhite but were afforded many of the privileges of White people, being fairly wealthy Southern slaveholders with property rights.

They were occasionally seen performing manual labor; their method of chopping wood was particularly effective: they would wield an axe with all four hands, for more force, or would rapidly alternate turns swinging.

[59] Partial retirement ended up not suiting the Bunkers, and they sought to resume touring for what they called financial reasons: they said they needed to earn more money to support their then-seven children.

They traveled to New York City in 1849 with daughters Katherine and Josephine, both aged five, but the brief tour petered out because of poor management, and they returned to North Carolina.

[63] Contrary to popular belief, Barnum did not create the Bunkers' careers; in fact, they were competitors in the entertainment business and the twins had already become world-famous from their own tours.

[66] Californians at the time were in the midst of figuring out how to deal with a recent influx of Chinese immigrants, and the arrival of the Bunkers (as well as two of Eng's sons, Patrick and Montgomery) was put in the spotlight.

"[73] By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, the twins' finances had suffered (they had lent money that was repaid in worthless Confederate currency) and their slaves were emancipated, so they decided to resume touring.

[76] In 1870, Chang, Eng, and two sons went to Germany and Russia; they wanted to further explore Europe, but returned home to avoid the developing Franco-Prussian War.

It was said that both Chang and Eng favored Sarah; according to a contemporary newspaper, however, "To any but an oriental taste, [Adelaide] was much the prettiest, being, in fact, a handsome and showy brunette.

Eng was healthy physically yet weary from spending the past week with a seriously ill Chang, so he asked to move to their bed after hours of drifting in and out of sleep.

After their deaths, their good friend Jesse Franklin Graves recalled, "[Eng's] kindness was received with the warmest appreciation by Chang, whose disposition was very different from the morose, ill nature so falsely ascribed to him [by the press].

Almost from the moment they stepped off the boat in Boston they were probed, pinched, pictured, and pondered by physicians and other scientists representing the spectrum of learned associations.

The New York Herald ran a front-page story about the Bunkers' deaths, which attracted public demand for an autopsy as well as the attention of William Pancoast, who successfully petitioned for the opportunity to study the twins.

It was rumored that Pancoast and other physicians had offered money to Chang and Eng's widows to inspect the twins, but more likely the doctors pressured the sisters into giving up the bodies by framing this donation as their "duty to science and humanity".

[citation needed] "In the end," wrote academic Cynthia Wu in 2012, "that Eng died of fright prevails not only in the medical record but also in the popular-cultural imagination.

[4] Before the Bunkers' bodies were returned to North Carolina for burial (in 1917 they were moved to the cemetery at White Plains Baptist Church outside Mount Airy), doctors took photographs of the connecting tissue and hired sculptor John Casani to make a plaster cast of the twins.

The Bunkers' fused livers are preserved in fluid and displayed in a clear jar along with the death cast in Philadelphia's Mütter Museum as a permanent exhibition.

[106] The anti-socialist political cartoonist Thomas Nast in 1874 drew "The American Twins", in which a worker ("Labor") wears an apron next to a businessman ("Capital") with a sack of money who are joined at the chests with a band labeled "The Real Union".

[112] The play I Dream of Chang and Eng by playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, a "reimagining" of the twins' lives that departs somewhat from truthfulness, was workshopped and performed at UC Berkeley in 2011.

[113] Chang and Eng (played by Danial Son and Yusaku Komori) are featured in the musical biopic The Greatest Showman (2017) about the early years of the Barnum & Bailey Circus.