It is still just a modified British Red Canton though.
As for the mata, different numbers of rings and rays represent different tribes on the islands of Ponso no Tao and Jimagaod. It’s also worth noting there’s a new law protecting the use of Aboriginal traditional symbolisms. Some people may not want their tribal symbol used as a national one. That’s why I eventually gave up using the distinctive Tao mata on the flag, and opted to use to simple rhombus shaped mata. It’s harder to claim a basic geometric shape for exclusive tribal use…
Do you know of any references about which tribe has which mata, and how they are interpreted? It seems to me that an entirely new mata would have to be invented for the purpose. As I mentioned before, I would prefer the sun to have nine outer points–this can be glossed as a symbol of unity in diversity. (Whether there should be more than one nimbus is something I’m not sure about, but I have seen much simpler versions.) Also, maybe the black should be changed to blue, so as to limit the flag to the same three colors.
One big obstacle would be that somebody would have to figure out how to describe the final design in the flag law.
On the Olympic usage, I believe the 1981 agreement states that the Chinese Taipei team will use the flag of its Olympic Committee. Whether the Olympic Committee could mischievously change its flag to the national flag is an interesting question, but I doubt that the flag was ever described very thoroughly. At most, the agreement might have stated that the flag would feature the ROC national seal (or perhaps the language of “blue sky, white sun” would be used), without necessarily clarifying what the seal consisted of, or how the sun would be drawn. Of course all this would be challenged in committees and such (and I realize that the Olympic people are whores), and China wouldn’t recognize the changes anyway (think “Zhungguo Taipei”).
Another idea: On the British model, it would be easy to add presidential seals or whatnot in the red field.
I think it was originally up to artistic choice. Divergence of how many black rings and how many rays on a particular ring is a slow organic evolution and not because of someone said “our tribe must have so many rings”, it just became that way.
I couldn’t find the article that I saw awhile ago about which village uses how many rings and rays.
Mata is indeed the ancestor’s eyes though. It’s called mata no tatara. Tatara refers to a single person or two persons small boat. A 10-person large boat is called chinurikuran. The mata is the most important part of a ship’s decoration. Before carving the mata, a special ceremony must held, and once the mata is carved, Tao believes the ship has life.
There are other symbols on a tatara or chinurikuran. There’s the man shaped tao-tao wu, tao is the Austronesian root word for man, and tao-tao wu is the “first of men”.
There are swirl patterns attached to the tao-tao wu, similar to New Zealand’s koru, that symbolizes vitality.
Pairs of black triangles form a column called Ngepengepen, also called the boat’s teeth.
The Ngepengepen forms a row of white rhombus, and they are called Osowso.
Finally there’s a wave pattern called Volavolow that lines the ship.
Thank you, Hansioux. The symbol may be the “eye” of the boat (mata means “eye” in several related languages, including Bahasa Indonesia), but it is also a sun, no? I mean, they certainly look like suns. The concept reminds of of the “evil eye” found in the eastern Mediterranean. (The design is not evil, rather it wards off evil.)
I can’t imagine incorporating all the other design elements, though.
I see some familiar-looking entries. My favorites are the rainbow flag with white mata, the four-color one with 7 horizontal stripes (white, blue, yellow, green, yellow, blue, white), and the blue field / green triangle / white lily one. But it looks like the whale and the psychedelic monkey got the most up-votes.
The UCCU competition was over last week. My Taiwan Flag Design google community is involved with that competition at an early stage. The person behind the competition worked very hard and managed to gain some support from company sponsoring the competition’s prizes, and some politician backing the project.
However, UCCU and the person behind the competition was short on time and technical know-how to make the submission process easy. So the process involved people e-mailing their design in, and the person behind the competition had to manually upload each design to facebook. There were about 100 submissions, so the person in charge had to do it 100 times. Imagine if he got New Zealand amount of submissions.
There were plenty of similar contest in the past, some with much better submission process. This one is unique because it is hosted by graphic designers.
I submitted a few of my designs (like 3), but I worried about flooding the person in charge with submissions. The lack of a panel or have a separate category for satirical designs meant that in the end those flags with designs equivalent to “Boaty McBoatface” won the competition. The person in charge says this isn’t the last one they will do, so hopefully the process becomes more refined in the future.
Meanwhile, Pangcah came up with their own flag, and it’s amazing.
The people in the photo are Pangcah singer Suming and his family. They are at Guam attending the Festival of Pacific Arts. They later said the flag is a flag for Pangcah. Although I have to say it’s the first time I’ve seen it. The star I think is made up of 6 rhombus shaped matas. I saw that decoration on walls the last time I visited Dulan.
Back to designing new flags that can be adopted without amending the ROC constitution, i.e. “red earth with blue sky and white sun in the top left canton”, I offer you two solutions:
Designed by one of my Taiwan Flag Design community participants. I called for designing a new flag that can be adopted without having to make changes to the constitution, and like two people responded
Although too similar to the Japanese imperial naval flag (the Rising Sun Flag) for my comfort, I have to admit it and its variants look pretty good.
^Not a fan … I prefer simpler designs, like the tricolors or the Nordic cross, or straightforward ones like the Japanese or Canadian flags.
I have a feeling that if one day there’s a referendum on the Taiwanese flag, the current one is gonna win, mostly because there’s no better option and people are used to the old one.
Designed by one of my Taiwan Flag Design community participants. I called for designing a new flag that can be adopted without having to make changes to the constitution, and like two people responded
Although too similar to the Japanese imperial naval flag (the Rising Sun Flag) for my comfort, I have to admit it and its variants look pretty good.[/quote]
Jesus that would have the Chinese raining down bombs on us in, like, 20 seconds. Its a Japanese nationalist flag by any other name.
[quote=“hansioux”]
Designed by one of my Taiwan Flag Design community participants. I called for designing a new flag that can be adopted without having to make changes to the constitution, and like two people responded
Although too similar to the Japanese imperial naval flag (the Rising Sun Flag) for my comfort, I have to admit it and its variants look pretty good.[/quote]
No change in the text portion of the constitutional is required. The ChineseTaipei flag already set the precedent and it is legal. So any other symbol/emblem/insignia does not require changing text either.
Yeah, it’s visually similar to the rising sun flag, too similar for me to consider it a viable option. Having said that, it’s also worth noting that particular design isn’t exactly a tribute to the rising sun flag.
First, the rising sun flag is centered, where this design is shifted to the canton. Second, the rising sun flag has 16 red and white rays each. This design on the other hand has only 12 rays, like that of the KMT emblem.
Finally, when SYS first brought up the KMT emblem design at Tongmenghui (Chinese Revolutionary Alliance) back in 1907, the rest of the revolution leaders rejected the proposal on the basis of it being too similar to the Japanese flag. So technically, it’s hard to criticize other designs looking like the Japanese flag…
I wonder what this flag would look like with a blue circle instead of a blue canton to represent the sky? (The constitutional text doesn’t specify.)
Hopefully Google will start to pick up some of these images for when people search for “Taiwan flag proposals” or whatever. I’m tired of seeing the red-and-green “four hearts” flag. Not to mention all the zillions of images that have nothing to do with Taiwan…
A group called “Let Taiwan be Taiwan” is going to hold a flag design competition to redesign Taiwan’s Olympic Committee Flag. Winner takes 100K NTD.
The current flag for “Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee” looks like this:
The flag features the KMT emblem, not the ROC emblem, which is almost identical except for the scale of the sun, but the Olympics Committee rejected the flag with the ROC emblem, so the Chinese Taipei team is basically representing the KMT under the current banner. The red white and blue plum flower is a shout out to the ROC flag and the ROC’s national flower.
Changing the poorly designed and misrepresenting flag could go a long way to boost Taiwanese self identity. The “Let Taiwan be Taiwan” group is probably hoping a new Olympic flag could have similar symbolic meaning as New Zealand All Black’s Silver Fern flag, which fosters national consensus on changing the national flag.
The red rectangle with imperial yellow border represents the fraternity of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, the Chinese people
The blue disc represents the free nation of the Republic of China as a manifestation of the love of the nation and liberty
The white 12-pointed solar star honors the historical origin of the Republic of China and at the same time transcending political parties. It stands for democracy and equality
