Yuan Shih-Kai – Ermine and Flags

A postcard first issued in 1928 to commemorate Yuan Shih-kai, the not always popular ‘First President of the Chinese Republic’ (I won’t go into the whole history here so save the Sun Yat-sen comments). This postcard, I think, is interesting for a number of reasons. One of the great stories about Yuan is that he started to increase the amount of gold braid and ermine he adorned himself with once in power rising to almost imperial levels. The picture in this postcard is reasonably restrained but does feature a fair bit of gold on his tunic. By the time he died he was wearing considerably more and even this amount is far more than Sun Yat-sen would have been comfortable with I think.

The second reason is that it features the Five Races Under One Union flag, which was used as a national flag from the inception of the Republic in 1912 until the demise of the warlord government in 1928. The harmony of the five races theme was a major concept of the First Republic: Han (red), Manchu (yellow), Mongols (blue), Hui (white) and Tibetans (black). Of course, whether you feel this was more progressive than now depends on your politics – remember the Manchus had just been ousted and all of Mongolia (outer and inner) was claimed. The flag was dropped after the Northern Expedition and the ousting of the Beiyang Government in 1928. However, you will occasionally see similar flags from Japanese occupied Manchuria (or Manchukuo as they would have had it) with the Japanese (red), Han (blue), Mongols (white), Koreans (black) and Manchus (yellow) – but that was a flag of occupation.