A 140-year-old Chinese diplomacy book is going viral for its hilarious flag drawings 😂

A Qing Dynasty foreign affairs book from around 140 years ago has unexpectedly gone viral on Chinese social media — not for the treaties, but for the flags. 😂

The book, Tongshang Yuezhang Cheng’an Huibian, can be translated as “Collected Trade Treaties, Regulations and Precedents.” It was compiled in the late Qing era as an official reference work for dealing with foreign trade and diplomacy.

The background was not exactly chill. After the Opium Wars, China was forced into a new reality of foreign treaties, treaty ports, customs rules, diplomatic exchanges and commercial disputes with Western powers and neighboring countries. Local officials suddenly had to deal with complicated international matters, but many did not have a clear, organized handbook to follow. So the Qing government put together this massive collection to help officials look up treaties, rules, cases and procedures when handling foreign affairs.

One section included hand-drawn flags of different countries, including Austria-Hungary and Paraguay. But because editors and artists at the time lacked standardized color references, accurate images and modern printing methods, some flags came out looking… creatively interpreted. Crowns became cartoon hats, emblems turned into smiley faces, and complicated symbols were simplified into whatever could be drawn and carved.

Chinese netizens are now calling the flags ugly-cute, weirdly adorable and extremely meme-able. The funniest part? This was serious government paperwork.

A Qing Dynasty diplomacy manual accidentally becoming a sticker pack 140 years later? History really said: let me cook. 🏳️📜