Liu Yongfu was born on 10 October 1837, in the town of Qinzhou (Ch'in-chou, 欽州) in southern China, close to the Vietnamese border.

The short conflict enabled Liu to come to an early arrangement with the Vietnamese authorities, who had observed the performance of the Black Flag Army with great interest.

His first target was the border town of Lào Cai, which had recently been occupied by a force of Cantonese bandits under the command of He Junchang (Ho Chun-ch'ang, 何均昌).

The Chinese expedition was commanded by the veteran general Feng Zicai, who would later win fame during the Sino-French War (August 1884 – April 1885) by defeating a French column at the Battle of Zhennan Pass (24 March 1885).

[5] In the next few years, Liu Yongfu established a profitable protection racket on commerce on the Red River between Sơn Tây and Lào Cai.

[7] In 1873, the Vietnamese government enlisted the help of Liu's Black Flag Army to defeat the first French attempt to conquer Tonkin, led by the naval lieutenant Francis Garnier.

The youthful enseigne de vaisseau Adrien-Paul Balny d’Avricourt led an equally small column out of the citadel to support Garnier, but he also died leading his men.

In April 1883, in the wake of Rivière's capture of Nam Định (27 March), the Chinese and Vietnamese were again able to enlist the support of Liu Yongfu and the Black Flag Army against the French in Tonkin.

So I am first making this proclamation: You French bandits, if you think you are strong enough, send your rabble of soldiers to Phủ Hoài to fight in the open field with my tiger warriors, and then we will see who is the strongest.

His small force (around 450 men) advanced without proper precautions, and blundered into a well-prepared Black Flag ambush at Paper Bridge (Pont de Papier), a few miles to the west of Hanoi.

In December 1883, however, Liu Yongfu suffered a major defeat at the hands of Admiral Amédée Courbet in the Sơn Tây Campaign.

Although there were also Chinese and Vietnamese contingents at Sơn Tây, the Black Flag Army bore the brunt of the fighting, and took very heavy casualties.

[11] Angered that his Chinese and Vietnamese allies had done little to support the Black Flag Army at Sơn Tây, Liu stood on the sidelines during the Bắc Ninh Campaign (March 1884).

While General François de Négrier's 2nd Brigade pinned the Black Flags frontally and subjected Hưng Hóa to a ferocious artillery bombardment from the Trung Xa heights, General Louis Brière de l'Isle's 1st Brigade made a flank march to the west to cut Liu's line of retreat.

On the evening of 11 April, seeing Brière de l'Isle's Turcos and marine infantry emerging behind their flank at Xuân Đông, the Black Flags evacuated Hưng Hóa before they were trapped inside it.

One of Millot's final achievements was to advance up the Lô River and throw the Black Flag Army out of Tuyên Quang in the first week of June, again without a single French casualty.

But French attention was diverted by the sudden crisis with China provoked by the Bắc Lệ ambush (23 June 1884), and during the eventful summer of 1884 the Black Flags were left to lick their wounds.

The Empress Dowager Cixi responded to the news of the destruction of China's Fujian Fleet at the Battle of Fuzhou (23 August 1884) by ordering her generals to invade Tonkin to throw the French out of Hanoi.

Although Liu had bitter memories of his previous service as an ally of China, he respected Tang (the only Chinese commander to have contributed troops to the defence of Sơn Tây), and agreed to take part with the Black Flag Army in the forthcoming campaign.

Appointed a divisional general in the Yunnan Army, Liu helped the Chinese forces put pressure on Hưng Hóa and the isolated French posts of Phủ Doãn and Tuyên Quang during the autumn of 1884.

[14] One of the conditions of the peace treaty between France and China that ended the Sino-French War was that Liu Yongfu and the Black Flag Army should leave Tonkin.

Liu crossed into China with some of his most loyal followers, but the bulk of the Black Flag Army was disbanded on Tonkinese soil in the summer of 1885.

Meanwhile, the Qing government rewarded Liu Yongfu for his services in the Sino-French War with a minor military appointment in Guangdong province.

The Taiwanese attempted to resist the Japanese occupation, and a short-lived Democratic Republic of Formosa was declared by the Chinese governor Tang Jingsong on 25 May 1895.

Ten days after declaring independence Tang Jingsong fled to Mainland China, and Liu replaced him as head of government (though he did not, as is often claimed, succeed to the presidency).

On 20 October 1895 Liu fled to the mainland aboard the British-flagged merchant ship SS Thales with the Japanese cruiser Yaeyama in close pursuit.

The talk would then be all of the Black and Yellow Flags, and of the long years of feuds and hatreds in the steaming malarial jungle and on the silent reaches of the great river.

But when he died, in January 1917, it was as the scourge of a formidable foreign enemy, the hero whose achievements were nullified by the cowardice of his own government, that he was mourned by his countrymen, and that is the way they still remember him.