Flags of China

People's Republic of China

Who & why: the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, wins the Chinese Civil War against the Nationalist Kuomintang and proclaims the People's Republic in Beijing on 1 October 1949, while the defeated Nationalist government relocates to Taiwan (see Taiwan's own page). The PRC governs the mainland continuously since, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping's post-1978 market reforms, and its emergence as the world's second-largest economy. The PRC claims Taiwan as part of its own territory, a claim Taiwan's government disputes; this remains an unresolved, live political question.

What it represents: designed by Zeng Liansong and adopted just before the founding declaration, the large gold star stands for the Communist Party's leadership, the four smaller stars for the social classes (workers, peasants, urban petty bourgeoisie, and national capitalists) the party claimed to unite. Red is the color of revolution and of Han Chinese tradition alike.

Republic of China (Nationalist government, mainland)

Who & why: Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Kuomintang completes the Northern Expedition against regional warlords in 1928 and adopts this flag — already the Kuomintang's own party banner since 1917–25 — as the national flag, ending the Beiyang era. The government fights a brutal, if intermittently paused, civil war against the Communist Party from 1927 almost continuously to 1949, interrupted by the full-scale Japanese invasion of 1937–45 (part of World War II in the Pacific), before losing the mainland to the Communists in 1949 and relocating to Taiwan, where this same flag continues today — see Taiwan's own page.

What it represents: the white 12-rayed sun on blue (Blue Sky with a White Sun) was Kuomintang founder Sun Yat-sen's own revolutionary emblem; the rays stand for the twelve traditional double-hours of the day, urging constant progress. Red for the field completes "Blue Sky, White Sun, and a Wholly Red Earth."

Republic of China (Beiyang government)

Who & why: the Xinhai Revolution, beginning with the Wuchang Uprising in October 1911, topples the last Qing emperor, six-year-old Puyi, who formally abdicates in February 1912, ending over two thousand years of imperial rule. The republic that follows is nominally unified but in practice runs through competing Beiyang Army warlord factions and a series of weak central governments in Beijing, until the Kuomintang's Northern Expedition brings the country under one nationalist government by 1928.

What it represents: five horizontal stripes for the "five races" the new republic claimed to unite — Han (red), Manchu (yellow), Mongol (blue), Hui/Muslim (white), and Tibetan (black) — a deliberate break from the dynastic dragon banner toward an inclusive multi-ethnic republic.

Qing Dynasty

Who & why: the Manchu-led Qing conquer Beijing in 1644 and rule China for nearly 270 years, China's last imperial dynasty. Facing Western and Japanese naval powers that all sailed under national flags, the Qing court adopts a triangular yellow dragon banner for its navy in the 1860s–70s and formalizes a rectangular version as the empire's first official national flag in 1889. The dynasty's final decades bring the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and mounting foreign pressure, ending with the 1911 Xinhai Revolution and Puyi's 1912 abdication.

What it represents: the azure five-clawed dragon, an imperial emblem used for centuries before it ever appeared on a flag, chasing a flaming red pearl across a field of imperial yellow — the dynasty's own color. This is the flag's late, most standardized 1889 form; earlier Qing use was informal and mostly naval.

Ming Dynasty

Who & why: Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and monk, leads the rebellion that drives out the Mongol Yuan Dynasty and founds the Ming in 1368, restoring native Han Chinese rule. The Ming build the Forbidden City, send Zheng He's treasure fleets across the Indian Ocean, and complete much of the Great Wall's surviving stone construction, before falling to peasant rebellion and the invading Manchu in 1644.

What it represents: no flag in the vexillological sense exists yet anywhere in Chinese governance; imperial authority is marked instead through dragon-embroidered banners, yellow as the emperor's reserved color, and elaborate court regalia. Shown here honestly as undocumented rather than invented, with the dynasty's own red-and-gold palette as a reference only.

Yuan Dynasty (Mongol rule)

Who & why: Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, completes the conquest of Song China and proclaims the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, ruling China as one part of the wider Mongol Empire's fractured successor khanates. Yuan rule ends in 1368 when Ming rebellion drives the Mongol court back to the steppe. This page keeps the Yuan entry brief on purpose: the Mongol Empire's own formation, conquests, and banners are covered in far greater depth on this atlas's dedicated Mongol Empire page, and Mongolia's own later national history is covered on its own page too.

What it represents: no fixed Yuan state flag is documented; Mongol military and court banners of this era are treated fully on the Mongol Empire page rather than duplicated here.

Song Dynasty

Who & why: Zhao Kuangyin reunifies most of China after the chaotic Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, founding the Song in 960. The dynasty presides over a commercial and technological golden age — movable type, gunpowder weapons, paper money — but never fully controls the north, losing it to the Jurchen Jin in 1127 (the Northern/Southern Song divide) before the remaining Southern Song is finally conquered by Kublai Khan's Mongols in 1279, absorbed into the Yuan.

What it represents: as with the Ming, no state flag exists yet; red is the dynasty's associated ceremonial color under traditional five-elements cosmology, shown here as a color reference rather than a documented banner.

Tang Dynasty

Who & why: the Li family founds the Tang in 618 after the short, harsh Sui Dynasty's collapse, presiding over what is widely regarded as a high point of premodern Chinese civilization — cosmopolitan Chang'an (then likely the world's largest city), the flourishing of Tang poetry, and Silk Road trade at its peak. The dynasty weakens after the An Lushan Rebellion (755–63) and finally collapses in 907, opening the fractured Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period that the Song later reunifies.

What it represents: again, no flag survives from this period; the placeholder gold reflects the dynasty's imperial and Buddhist-influenced court palette rather than any attested banner.

Han Dynasty

Who & why: Liu Bang founds the Han after the short-lived Qin's collapse, ruling (with the brief Wang Mang interregnum splitting it into Western and Eastern Han) for roughly four centuries — a span so long and so formative that China's majority ethnic group still calls itself Han today. The dynasty expands the empire's borders, opens the Silk Road under Emperor Wu, and standardizes Confucian state ideology, before regional warlordism ends it in 220 CE, opening the Three Kingdoms period.

What it represents: no national flag exists this early; red, associated with the fire element that Han cosmology assigned the dynasty, is shown here as an informed color reference only.

Qin Dynasty

Who & why: King Zheng of the state of Qin conquers the last of the rival Warring States and proclaims himself Qin Shi Huang, the "First Emperor," in 221 BCE — the moment this page treats as China's first unified imperial state, and the origin of the very name "China" in most Western languages. His famously short but transformative fifteen-year dynasty standardizes writing, currency, and cart-axle widths, links early wall fortifications into what becomes the Great Wall's first version, and builds the terracotta army; it collapses into civil war within four years of his death, giving way to the Han.

What it represents: no flag exists in this era; Qin state ideology, following the Five Elements theory, formally favored black as the color of the water element the dynasty claimed to rule under — a documented historical detail shown here as a color reference, not an invented flag.

Zhou Dynasty

Who & why: King Wu of Zhou overthrows the last Shang king at the Battle of Muye in 1046 BCE, founding a dynasty that formally lasts longer than any other in Chinese history. Royal authority is real but limited under the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE); after the court is forced east in 771 BCE, the Eastern Zhou kings reign as figureheads while real power shifts to competing regional states through the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE) and the escalating warfare of the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). Confucius, Laozi, Mozi, Mencius, and Sun Tzu all live and write during this fragmented Eastern Zhou span. The state of Qin, one of the Warring States' eventual victors, deposes the last Zhou king in 256 BCE and completes China's unification in 221 BCE.

What it represents: no national flag exists this early; red, the fire-element color Han-era cosmologists later retrospectively assigned the Zhou within the Five Elements scheme, is shown here as an informed color reference only, not an attested banner.

World context: the Zhou's eight centuries span the traditional founding of Rome (753 BCE), the rise of classical Greece and the Parthenon's construction (447–432 BCE), the Persian Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great and Darius I, and the roughly contemporaneous lives of the Buddha in India and Confucius in China during the 6th–5th centuries BCE — a span later historians call the Axial Age for its parallel flowering of philosophy and religion across Eurasia.

Xia (traditional) and Shang Dynasties

Who & why: Chinese historical tradition, first recorded centuries later, describes a Xia dynasty founded by the legendary Yu the Great around 2070 BCE; its existence as an actual centralized state, rather than a later legendary elaboration, remains genuinely debated among historians, with the Bronze Age Erlitou culture the most-cited possible archaeological match, though the identification is not settled. The Shang dynasty that follows from roughly 1600 BCE is different in kind: it is the first period of Chinese history directly confirmed by contemporary written evidence, thanks to oracle bone inscriptions excavated at Anyang (the late Shang capital, Yinxu) alongside sophisticated cast bronze ritual vessels. Shang rule ends in 1046 BCE when the Zhou state's King Wu defeats the last Shang king at the Battle of Muye.

What it represents: no flag or comparable banner is attested for either dynasty; Shang authority is documented instead through oracle bone divination records and bronze ritual vessels, and nothing at all is documented, in the modern sense, for the disputed Xia. Shown here honestly blank rather than invented.

World context: this span runs alongside ancient Egypt's Middle and New Kingdoms — including the construction of Karnak's great temple complex and, later, Abu Simbel under Ramesses II — Babylon's Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE), and the Mycenaean Greek civilization of the traditional Trojan War era, placing Shang China's oracle-bone script among the world's earliest writing systems, alongside Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform.