Liu Yongfu - Early Years

Early Years

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. Qinzhou, now in Guangxi province, was at that time in the extreme southwest of Guangdong province. The ancestral home of Liu's family was the village of Popai in Guangxi province, and when he was eight his parents moved to Shangsizhou (Shang-ssu-chou, 上思州) in Guangxi. Liu's family was poor, living by manual work for others, and was only just able to scrape a living. In 1857 Liu joined a local militia force commanded by Wu Yuanqing (Wu Yuan-ch'ing, 吳元清), who claimed to hold a commission from the Taipings.

The fall of Nanking and the collapse of the Taiping Rebellion in 1864 altered Liu's prospects dramatically for the worse. Imperial forces gradually began to reassert their control over southwest China, and it was only a matter of time before they secured Guangxi province. To escape their vengeance, Liu needed to make himself sufficiently powerful to give the Imperial generals pause. His first step was to buy some time by retreating into the mountains of northern Tonkin. In 1868 he abandoned Wu Yuanqing's rebels and crossed into Vietnam with a force of 200 soldiers whose loyalty he could trust. He had dreamed as a youth that he would one day become a famous 'General of the Black Tiger', and christened his tiny band of adventurers the Black Flag Army, heiqi jun (hei-ch'i chun, 黑旗軍). The Black Flags marched slowly through northern Tonkin, recruiting men to their standard as they went, and eventually set up camp just outside Son Tay, on the northern bank of the Red River.

The mountain regions of western Tonkin were inhabited by tribesmen who did not acknowledge the writ of the Vietnamese government, and these montagnards resented the arrival of the Black Flag Army on Vietnamese soil. Fearing that Liu might eventually pose a threat to their own ascendancy in the area, they declared their intention of attacking the intruders. Liu struck first, however, and defeated a far stronger army of montagnards in a surprise attack. 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. The Vietnamese government, reasoning that it would be difficult to dislodge Liu from its territory and that he might also be a useful ally against the refractory montagnards, co-opted Liu into its service in 1869 and gave him military rank in the Vietnamese army. Provided that he continued to act in accordance with his technical status as a Vietnamese military governor, the Vietnamese authorities promised not to trouble the Black Flag leader.