The Imperial Standard of China is yellow with a blue dragon. The official flag book of the Admiralty gives the flag of a Chinese Admiral as made up of the following horizontal stripes: yellow, white, black, green, red, a blue dragon on a white ground being the canton in the staff-head corner. The merchant ensign is shown in Fig. 247. Amongst the Chinese flags captured in 1841, and preserved in the Royal United Service Institution, is one with a blue centre with an inscription in white upon it, and with a broad notched border of white; another has its centre of a pale blue and a darker blue dragon upon it, the whole being surrounded by a broad and deeply-notched border of red. The flag of Siam is scarlet with a white elephant thereon. Before Xacca, the founder of the nation, was born his mother dreamt that she brought forth a white elephant, and the Brahmins affirm that Xacca, after a metempsychosis of eighty thousand changes, concluded his very varied experiences as this white elephant, and thence was received into the company of the Celestial Deities. On this account the white elephant is held a sacred beast, and the Siamese rejoice to place themselves beneath so potent a protector. The flag of Korea bears the tiger. In the thickly-wooded glens of the interior, the royal tiger is found in formidable numbers. The flag of Sarawak, a territory of some forty thousand square miles, on the north-west of Borneo, is shown in Fig. 252. The Government was obtained in 1842 from the Sultan of Borneo by an Englishman, Sir James Brooke, and it is still ruled by one of the family, a nephew of the first Rajah. In Africa, the only flags that we need particularize are those of the Orange Free State, Liberia, the Congo State, and the South African Republic. The Orange Free State was founded by Dutch emigrants from the Cape of Good Hope. It was proclaimed British territory in 1848, but by a Convention entered into in 1854, the inhabitants were declared to be "to all intents and purposes, a free and independent people, and their Government to be treated thenceforth as a free and independent Government." The flag, Fig. 249, is the only one that has orange in it, clearly in allusion to the name of the State, while the canton of red, white, and blue, equally shows the pride of the people in their Dutch origin. The flag of the Independent Negro Republic of Liberia, is shown in Fig. 250. The population largely consists of freed slaves, emigrants from America and their descendants, plus the aborigines. The flag, it will be seen, even to the thirteen stripes, is largely based on that of the United States, though one would have thought that that would have been about the last thing they would have selected. {126} The Congo Free State in Central Africa was established in 1885 by the King of the Belgians; its flag is the golden star on the blue ground that we see in Fig. 251, a device at once simple, expressive and pleasing.