China main field

Why this color matters

China's flag is almost all one colour, so this round is a pure test of that red — and it is sneakier than it looks. The true scoring red, #EE1C25, is bright and sits a hair on the cool side of pure red. Yet almost everyone's memory — and most printed and on-screen flags — nudges it the other way, toward a warm, orange lantern-red. The colour you are surest of is the one recall quietly distorts.

A flag designed in an attic

In July 1949 the new government advertised for a national flag. Zeng Liansong, a 32-year-old in Shanghai, sketched his entry over several nights in his attic — one of some 2,992 submissions. His idea: a large golden star for the Communist Party ringed by four smaller ones for the classes of the people, all on a revolutionary red ground. Red was doing triple duty — the revolution, the blood of those who died for it, and the oldest festival-and-fortune colour in Chinese life.

The people are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie.

Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” 1949 — the source of the four stars

Not the red you will reach for

Here is the twist the game exploits. For years the most-copied digital version of the flag used #DE2910, a red sitting at a distinctly warm 7° — orange-leaning. The current reference red, #EE1C25, is the opposite: at 357° it falls just short of pure red on the cool, crimson side. So the instinct to warm the flag toward vermilion is not only a memory slip — it is baked into the flags people have looked at for decades.

A red with no Pantone

The scoring target is #EE1C25 — HSB(357°, 88%, 93%): vivid and bright, high saturation, with that faint cool lean (its blue just edges out its green). Strictly, there is no official swatch to match — the national standard GB 12983-2004 fixes the flag's colour in the CIE 1964 colour space under daylight D65, not as a Pantone chip; the hex we all use is sampled from the reference image. Aim for a clean, luminous red — not orange, and not deep burgundy.

Why the stars are gold

The gold was a colour decision as much as a symbol. On a red ground, yellow reads brighter and cleaner than white would, so the stars seem to glow; officially they are golden rays over a red land. The geometry carries a message too — each small star tips one point toward the big one, so the cluster leans inward as a picture of unity. And the designer never knew he had won until a letter arrived: the committee had shifted his star, dropped an early hammer-and-sickle, and sent a reward of 5,000,000 (old) yuan — about 500 yuan after the currency reform.