Yellow Dragon Flag

Royal Museums Greenwich writes that the Qing state had no national flag of standard design until the second half of the 19th century, and two dates are given for the first one. On 27 October 1862 the American minister in Peking, Anson Burlingame, told Secretary of State Seward that “the Chinese government has adopted a national flag”, and sent Prince Kung’s communication of 22 October: a dragon flag, triangular, ten feet broad for the largest vessels and seven to eight feet for smaller craft, its ground yellow, with a dragon painted on it, head pointing upwards, so that it could be instantly recognised. Royal Museums Greenwich dates it instead to 1866, when the Zongli Yamen, the foreign office set up in 1861, announced a yellow triangular flag with a flying dragon for ships hired to arrest robbers. In the museum’s account it was never declared a formal national flag but it was used on official occasions as a sign of national identity: on the gunboats built in England for the Qing government and sent to China in 1879, and when Admiral Ding Ruchang sailed the Chaoyong and the Yangwei, built on the Tyne, for Tianjin in 1881. In 1888 the Qing government issued the Regulations for the Beiyang Fleet, which laid down the standard design of the national flag.