I'd heard this one before, but listened again to refresh my memory. First-rate all the way, no doubt about it. A terrific CBSRMT.

Like many of Slesar's episodes, this is an unacknowledged adaptation of one of his short stories (in this case also called "The Chinaman Button"). Since CBSRMT had a policy against buying stories for adaptation (any adaptations done were of classics which were out of copyright), prose writers like Slesar and Alfred Bester frequently just adapted theirs anyway, without mentioning their original story (or charging Himan Brown for it--more to the point).

Interestingly, another show Slesar worked for, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, had exactly the opposite policy--virtually *all* their episodes were adaptations of purchased stories. The producers felt that by buying something already extant, they could stave off disaster--in other words, as long as a decent plot and characters were in hand, an episode couldn't go too wrong. (Certainly some CBSRMTs went pretty far wrong, so maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.)

Anyway, great choice. One of the all-time classics.