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image by Corentin Chamboredon, 18 April 2017
A Flickr account dedicated to the Tibetan flag has gathered several old
photographs. I had never seen several of them, and for once, the sources are
quoted:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tibetanflag/
There is a photograph
with a strange flag. It shows soldiers holding two Tibetan flags. One of them is
the regimental flag of the Khadang regiment, as the letter and number on it
indicate. The other one is basically the same flag, but the symbols that appear
on the white mountain are missing: no snow lions, no flaming jewels, no
wish-fulfilling gem, no script. Maybe its colors had waned, and the symbols had
also just faded.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tibetanflag/32492445480/
The caption reads
: "Tibetan army near Lhasa with the Tibetan National Flag. Photo taken by A.T.
"Arch" Steele in 1944. Credit: A.T. Steele Papers, Special Collections, Arizona
State University Libraries"
The other photographs I knew generally showed
two flags, only one of them being partially visible. One photograph show us both
flags, and we can see both have the usual symbols. I'm not sure of which
regiment they belonged to, but they look like the flag used by general Derge Se,
which I think was Tadang regiment's officer:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tibetanflag/32523693322/
The caption reads
: "The Dalai Lama's regiment marches with the Tibetan national flag. The Potala
palace can be seen in the Background. Photo by Heinrich Harrer, 1949"
Other photographs, the first one showing the flag of Khadang regiment:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tibetanflag/33165863406/
The caption reads
"Photo of the Tibetan Army in Lhasa in 1958. Taken by Chinese government
photographer Chen Zonglie."
On this one, we don't see symbols on the left
flag, but it isn't unfurled so we can't be sure:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tibetanflag/33283351475/
The caption reads
"Photo the Tibetan army with the Tibetan national flag from Lowell Thomas' book
"Out of this World." "
Corentin Chamboredon, 4 April 2017
I have wondered before if Tibetan military flags couldn't
have been two-sided or double-sided since several photographs show letters and
numbers in reading direction (from left to right in Tibetan), despite them being
on the reverse side of the flag (that is to say, with the hoist on the right).
It could also simply be that Tibetan flags were supposed to be displayed with
the hoist on the right. It would be quite surprising since people tend to match
the direction of their flag with the direction of their writing, but who
knows...
We do have examples of flags displayed leftwards (seven on this
flickr account) of rightwards (four), but I had never seen any one with a blank
mountain. Maybe it was just an unfinished flag ?
Corentin Chamboredon,
4 April 2017
Thanks to Tibetanflag's flickr, I discovered new things in footage of a color
film made by Lowell Thomas in Tibet in 1949 (see
https://youtu.be/MNvDqykWvY8).
First, from 1:51 to 2:04, we wan see the flag with a blank mountain I had
reported. And the mountain is indeed deprived of its usual lions and other
symbols. Also, as the flag I had reported for the Khadang Regiment, it has three
borders of different colors: yellow at the upper border, red at the hoist
border, blue at the lower border. What is great is that I now know that this
flag has twelve stripes with three of them being yellow. Which makes, clockwise
from the lower hoist: blue, yellow, red, blue, red, yellow, red, blue, red,
blue, yellow, red.
There is another particularity to this flag : the sun in the center emits
no rays. There are twelve color stripes, but no rays seems to come out on
them.
Second, from 2:04 to 2:10 we can see the regular
regimental flag of Khadang
regiment. As Tibetanflag stresses, it looks like this flag is made of brocade.
It also has three borders of different colors, but they are not exactly the same
as those we can see on the film by Ilyia Tolstoy and Brooke Dolan in 1943 nor on
the "blank mountain" one above. Here the lower border is still blue, but the
upper border seems to be of a different shade of yellow (maybe golden ?) than
the stripes of the field, and the hoist border seems to have yet another shade
of yellow with blue or green ornamentations (maybe text as on the flag of the
Gadang Regiment?) here and there. The two squares and lozenge are yellow, of the
same shade of the stripes. (see note)
Then, between 1:05 and 1:17, we can see a flag
flown above a gate, east of the Potala. From the various maps of the city I have
checked and how close the palace seems to be, I think this flag was flown on the
eastern gate of the Shöl area. Shöl was the administrative village at the foot
of the palace, a compound which included the Army headquarters (or Magchigang in
Tibetan).
image by Corentin Chamboredon,
18 April 2017
This flag is square, with a red field. In the middle, there is
a yellow double-vajra and a white "cha" letter (ཆ) underneath. The flag has a
yellow border on three sides with two purple squares on top and bottom and a
lozenge in the middle. It looks very similar to a flag shown on a black and
white photograph (see the link below). It also has some similarity with a flag
reported at Tibetan Army (second flag, linked
here) from a 1945 film by
James Guthrie. But the differences are also very clear: the flag filmed by
Thomas has a different shape and color, and displays an additional letter, a
border with squares and a lozenge. In contrast, the flag filmed by Guthrie is
clearly rectangular and orange, without letters (as far as I can see).
There is a four years gap between these two films, a period which saw massive
political changes in Tibet. So I don't know if this simply shows two different
versions of the same flag, or if they were two different flags used in the same
time. The "cha" letter is somehow intriguing since it would indicate that this
flag belonged to the Chadang regiment which was transformed from an artillery
regiment to a police regiment in 1948. But the Chadang regiment was, if I'm
correct, based in the Jokhang complex in the very center of Lhasa, a place
which doesn't match with the surroundings shown of the film.
Sources :
https://youtu.be/MNvDqykWvY8
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tibetanflag/33723819200/
https://nyc.indymedia.org/images/2008/04/96773.jpg
http://www.tibet-encyclopaedia.de/tibetische-polizei.html
Corentin Chamboredon, 18 April 2018
Note: this flag has few a differences from the flags I
made for the Khadang Regiment: the few color images I
could find of this regimental flag showed it with two yellow stripes. See the
documentary The lost world of Tibet at 19:33, or Tolstoy's film from 14:12 to
14:45).
http://youtu.be/1GuBZ2BoXCg
http://youtu.be/dXKuLSeQDFE
Another difference is that in The lost world of Tibet, the flag has a blue
stripe on its lower fly, while this blank flag has a red stripe instead (as in
Tolstoy's film).
Corentin Chamboredon, 18 April 2018