Blood chit
document requesting safe passage and assistance for military personnel stranded in enemy territory
A blood chit (Chinese: 血幅; pinyin: xuè fú) is a notice carried by military personnel and addressed to any civilians who may come across an armed-services member – such as a shot-down pilot – in difficulties. As well as identifying the force to which the bearer belongs as friendly, the notice displays a message requesting that the service member be rendered every assistance.
Etymology
Alternative names are escape flag and identification flag (Chinese: 人物證明書; pinyin: rénwù zhèngmíng shū). "Chit" is a British English term for a small document, note or pass, representing a debt to be paid; it is an Anglo-Indian word dating from the late 18th century, derived from Hindi citthi.
History
The first blood chit may have been made in 1793 when French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated his hot air balloon in the United States. Because he could not control the direction of the balloon, no one knew where he would land. Because Blanchard did not speak English, George Washington, according to legend, gave him a letter that said that all U.S. citizens were obliged to assist him to return to Philadelphia.
In World War I, British Royal Flying Corps pilots in India and Mesopotamia carried a "goolie chit" printed in four local languages that promised a reward to anyone who would bring an unharmed British aviator back to British lines.
In the Second Sino-Japanese War prior to World War II, foreign volunteer pilots of Flying Tigers carried notices printed in Chinese that informed the locals that this foreign pilot was fighting for China and they were obliged to help them. A text from one such blood chit translates as follows:
I am an American airman.
“Blood chit” enters the record as document requesting safe passage and assistance for military personnel stranded in enemy territory. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Blood, chit and document can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Blood chit” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Blood, chit and document provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q772804. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1793.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blood chit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.