Black Flag Army, also called the Black Flag Pirates, was a Qing Dynasty banner army consisting of Arquebusiers and a Flamethrower unit. The army were Chinese irregular troops who occupied Tonkin.
History[]
The Black Flag Army was a splinter group of the Taiping Kien-kuo rebels that fled China for their Province of Tonkin in Vietnam after the defeat of the main rebels in Nanjing in 1864. Led by Liu Yongfu, the Black Flag Pirates were convinced by the Chinese viceroy to fight for them against the French, who launched incursions into Indochina. They occupied Hanoi and nearly defeated the French army, but were evicted in 1883 and during the Tonkin War they fought alongside the Qing Dynasty's forces.