Hong Kong

An anonymous commenter recently asked about my view on a hypothetic flag for an independent Hong Kong.

Firstly, let's face the flag issue... This is the current flag of Hong Kong:

In my opinion, it's a very good flag. But the red background and the five stars are clearly taken from People's Republic of China national flag. Before 1997, when Hong Kong was still a British colony, it used the following flag:

A number of photographs show a flag used by pro-autonomy or pro-independence protesters consisting of the British-age coat of arms, in blue background, with "Hong Kong" witten in Chinese ("香港"):


A former proposed flag of same movement is the following:


The fact that some groups are now avoiding directly British symbolism (the Union Jack) is a point I took to design my proposal below, admittedly inspired by Qing flag:


The blue background represents the British past and the port of Hong Kong. The dragon (and the red details) shows the Chinese culture of the region, and its golden color stands for the financial importance of Hong Kong for the world; notice it appears in the last three flags I showed. The white disk, apart from the rising sun, represents the nickname of "pearl of the Orient" given by the British and present in the coat of arms they attributed to there.

It's, obviously, only one of many paradigms one could take to create such flag.

Comments are welcome.
Notice I tried to be the most politically-neutral I could.

Yi people (China)

Following a request by Michal Hospodár, follower of this blog and a "netfriend", I made a first attempt to a flag representing the Yi (or Lolo) people that inhabits China, Vietnam and Thailand. I have to admit that it took some weeks before a decent idea came to me.

The Yi people suffers from an absence of own vexillology, so I had to start from zero. The inspiration that I cited are some ethnic Yi female folkloric costumes, with examples here, here and here. They all are black, with pink flowers. As I can't identify the specie of flower, I used lotus, common in Chinese vexillology (Macau, for example) and is a good shot. Here is the flag:

Although black and pink, in theory, isn't a good color combination to flags, well-chose shades can make a nice result. An alternative depiction is as follow:

Your comments are welcome.

This flag is made, in part, for scholar purposes, as ethnic flags on China are still officially banished, as far as I know.

Guangxi Zhuang (China)

According to a Chinese law in effect since 1997, subnational entities, like cities and provinces, can't have their own flags, with exception of SARs (special administrative regions), apparently. Some of main minorities in China, although, has historical or political flags to be identified with: Tibetans (Tibet), Mongols (Inner Mongolia), Manchus (Manchuria), and Uyghurs (Xinjiang, a.k.a. East Turkestan or Uyghuristan). It's not the case of Zhuang people, based in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Zhuang people is animist, and related with other people in Southern Asia. I pre-selected silk balls and copper drums to be used in my flag, as typical elements, and the last was the winner, for being used in cooking, music, war and rituals. A typical Zhuang copper drum is presented below:

I so worked to colors that could look good and symbolizes copper at same time, and result was this:

The sixteen-pointed (?) star seems to be a repeated theme in this copper drums, so it was used. Dark green and orange was the chose colors, because they look like the one of copper, and because green, in Chinese culture, represents harmony and prosperity. I'd like to use red, that means south, but I hadn't the opportunity.

I'm sad Indian and Chinese governments aren't friendly to regional flags, because I can see a great vexillological horizon to these parts of world.
What's your opinion about the flag? Comments are greatly welcome!