After a six-year review process, on Thursday the Yellow Tiger Flag used by the short-lived Republic of Formosa in 1895 was acknowledged by the Ministry of Culture as a national heritage item.
Following the Qing Empire’s defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894 and the signing of the Shimonoseki Treaty, then-governor-general of Taiwan Tang Ching-sung (唐景崧) formed an army to resist the Japanese takeover of the island, with the flag flying as their banner.
The National Taiwan Museum said the flag, 315cm wide and 263cm tall, is a copy made by Japanese painter Untei Takahashi of the flag flown over the cannons at Keelung in the 1895 battle.
Photo courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum
The copy was thought to have been made by Takahashi in 1909, a year before the Taiwan Governor Office Museum, the predecessor of National Taiwan Museum, was opened to the public, the museum said.
With all three original flags lost, Takahashi’s is the oldest known copy of the flag in existance and is thought to be the closest to the original design, the museum said.
When the museum filed an application for the flag to be considered a national heritage item six years ago, the ministry turned down the request on grounds that the flag was a copy and its relation to the original was unclear.
The museum began routine maintenance of the flag in 2013 while simultaneously starting a research project that lasted a year and three months, before providing all the new information it had gathered on the flag in another application sent to the ministry last year.
While it was thought that the tattered rear end of the tiger, as well as the path on its tail, was due to a lack of maintenance, the museum’s research found that it was likely due to Takahashi’s fidelity to the original.
The results of the research point to the possibility that the flag’s tattered state was due to the battle in Keelung, when the Japanese forces prevailed, the museum said, adding that if this was confirmed, the Takahashi copy would be even more valuable in historic terms.
Meanwhile, the museum said EasyCard Corp would be releasing three limited edition EasyCards of the flag — the 1909 Takahashi copy, a 1953 copy by Lin Yu-hsan (林玉山) and a digital reconstruction of the flag as it was in 1895.
Not only would the cards celebrate the acknowledgement of the flag’s status as a national heritage item, they would also be one of the first national heritage items to be printed on EasyCards, the museum said.
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