Over the next twenty years the Black Flags and their leader, Liu Yung-fu, were to acquire a certain legitimacy and fame in the service both of the Vietnamese King, Tự Đức, and of the Qing monarch for their struggle against French imperialism in Tonkin.
Further to the west, starting about 1872, bands of defeated rebels fleeing the Qing reconquest of Yunnan also began drifting across the frontier into Laos, then a tributary state of the Kingdom of Siam.