File talk:Flag of French Cochinchina (1868-1945).svg

Legitimacy of the flag

• Copied from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:French_Cochinchina&oldid=1033540646&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile

thumb|right|A chart of all the contemporary depictions I could find of this flag.

Hello fellow contributors,

Sometime ago I started doing research into the legitimacy of the Nguyễn Dynasty's supposed "Dragon Star Flag" to find as much contemporary sources that back it up, but while researching that I came across something quite interesting, the "Flag of Cochinchina" had been quite consistently attributed to the region for the entire existence of the French colony (and suspiciously before as well). Now I am not using the chart here to assert that this flag is legitimate, simply because that would be original research and I have no direct French or French Cochinchinese or French Indochinese government sources to back this claim up, but it seems that the attribution of this flag to the colony of French Cochinchina is somewhat consistent throughout its pre-WWII history. An important claim here is that French colonies didn't have their own flags and the flag is also notably absent from the 1941 Vichy government work that notes the flags and coats of arms of French Indochina, but interestingly enough a number of French sources also attribute this flag to French Cochinchina (but these are private companies rather than government or academic entities so I don't trust them, per se). Could it perhaps have been a type of civil ensign that had no official government usage? We know that French protectorates had their own flags and that the French legally discriminated between colonials, French colonists, and the inhabitants of French protectorates.

I am mostly opening this discussion here to get someone to provide good sources why this flag should be included or excluded from this article. Note that I am personally inclined to believe that the flag is illegitimate, but because it seems to have been found in so many different sources over such a long period I would like to open a discussion about it to clear things up. Note that historically this article did include this flag but that it was later removed. --Donald Trung (talk) 11:59, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

An important note would be that a European interpretation of an imperial banner (Chinese / Vietnamese) was also used as the "supposed flag of Cochinchina" as late as 1912 (as I could still find it on this Uruguayan card). So it would not be unheard of for Europeans (including their diaspora's in North America, South America, and Oceania) to misattribute a flag that had a completely different meaning in the Far East to be a "national flag". But with the flag here to the right it just seems odd that it was attributed so persistently especially since the German-language information card also includes a lot of facts about the demographics, number of French inhabitants, the size and population of Hồ Chí Minh City (then known as "Saigon") and the numerous currencies that circulated in French Cochinchina (that excluding the French made coins also Chinese, Siamese, and Mexican coins continued circulating), it would just seem really odd that a card like this would know so much about French Cochinchina, yet somehow misattribute the flag. --Donald Trung (talk) 12:14, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

@Havsjö: as you're the one that removed the flag I am curious to your perspective(s) on this, I am personally neutral on the flag but note that there is a lot of contemporary evidence while the colony was already under French domination. Perhaps it could be added as "an unofficial flag", similar to how Annam has both a colonial flag and a national flag used by the indigenous people(s), or do you think that it should have no place in the infobox at all? --Donald Trung (talk) 17:53, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Info on this flag (and also on Annam and Tonkin imo) is indeed sketchy. It seems that the depictions of the Cochinchina flag in your image are indeed just "missattributions" that has been copied, and copied, and copied, and so on (as your image also suggest at the end, a similar situation of "copy of a copy of a copy" originating from the very old chart (shown at the top of your image) occurs with details of the design of the pre-colonial flag of Burma also (red ring/circle behind peacock or no?))
Probably some style of flag like the yellow/spike-flag was used in PRE-colonial time (probably an interpretation of the "dragon star"), BUT during the French period Cochinchina was a "pure" colony (and not a protectorate) and it seems strange that that place would break the otherwise omnipresent French "custom" of using the plain French flag for colonies (while native flags were used for protectorates). And when would this practice have stopped, since the yellow/spike flag seems to only appears in older times when those old flag-charts (and their copies) seems to be the primary source for others to copy?
I only know that after WW2 (when French grip was somewhat relaxed over Indochina (Union -> Fedaration, autonomy etc), they got a blue-striped version of the Vietnamese flag for a few years before merging with the rest of Vietnam. As far as I can tell, this is the only "flag of Cochichina" during French rule that was not just the French flag. (During this time, some other French "pure" colonies" (i.e. pure-French-flags), such as in Africa, also got some changes to their flags that made them no longer be plain French-flags.
Bottom-Line: yellow/spike = interpretation of pre-colonial Dragon-Star in an old chart that has been spread due to copies of copies from that chart. IRL the French-period flag was just French flag (as in all other "pure" colonies). Shortly before the end (when colony-flags were "relaxed") the blue-stripe was used for a few years. --Havsjö (talk) 09:20, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

@Havsjö: , can't say that there is any part of your assessment that I disagree with or that it contradicts my research in any way, all historical sources I found that list that flag are often foreign (as in "not French") and while I had no issues finding many contemporary photographs of any later Vietnamese flags such as the yellow-red-yellow Dragon Star Flag or the colonial flag of the Nguyễn Dynasty, I had never been able to find a single photograph of it. Furthermore, the only French colony that had its own flag (kind of) was Algeria, but this was a civil ensign and wasn't used for very long. I also deliberately didn't add the Autonomous Republic's flag as I am planning on writing a separate article about that period of Cochinchinese history sometime in the future. Also, by the way I was very skeptical of the Cochinchinese flag with the two white stripes in the middle as multiple sources claimed that it was a misattribution and it had been deleted from Wikimedia Commons several times as "a fantasy", but later I found contemporary depictions of the flag. --Donald Trung (talk) 13:10, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Italian source debunking this flag

• http://web.archive.org/web/20210715184235/http://www.rbvex.it/asiapag/indocina.html

--Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 18:41, 15 July 2021 (UTC)