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You'll see the "Blue Sky, White Sun, and Red Earth" flag everywhere across Taiwan, and each year, streets are lined with this banner to celebrate Double Ten Day on October 10th. But is it really the flag of Taiwan? Who designed it? Today's episode is all about the ROC flag: an engrossing tale involving Dr. Sun Yat-sen, a martyr, warlords, and more. Learn about the various flags which contended for the honor to represent the Republic of China. Had fate gone differently, there might have been a five-striped banner flying from Taiwan’s flagpoles, or a really strange "hippy" one. Scroll down and you'll find it, as well as all the other flags talked about in this episode.
Note: All images are via Wikimedia Commons.
1. The flag of the "Great Qing," China's last dynasty.
2. The "Five Races Under One Union" flag, the first official national flag of the Republic of China (1912–1928)
3. The flag of the Wuchang Uprising, subsequently used as the flag of the army of the Republic of China
4. The Wuchang military nine-star flag, groovy, man!
5. Revolutionaries celebrate their successful rebellion known as the Wuchang Uprising, which occurred on October 10th, 1911.
6. An image of Lu Haodong 陸皓東 in his early youth. Lu designed the canton of the current ROC flag and died a martyr at the age of 27.
7. The "math" behind the design of the "Blue Sky with a White Sun," designed by Lu Haodong. He presented his design to represent the revolutionary army at the inauguration of the Society for Regenerating China, an anti-Qing society in Hong Kong, on February 21st, 1895.
8. The party emblem of the Kuomintang, (Chinese Nationalist Party or KMT). Most are likely unaware that while the ROC canton and the KMT emblem are almost identical, the rays of the sun in the KMT party emblem are actually slightly longer.
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Check our very first episode, the story of a very white man who showed up in London in 1703... and claimed to be from Formosa. Or try a foodie episode from Season 3. Or, for those who want some harder-core history, hear the tale of the Lockheed U-2 pilot Wang Hsi-chueh 王錫爵, who became famous for defecting to the PRC by hijacking China Airlines Flight 334 on May 3, 1986.
