TAIPEI (Reuter) - Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui got a rude surprise on Wednesday in Tegucigalpa, where his Honduran hosts inadvertently tagged him as head of the wrong China. Honduras welcomed Lee by splattering full-page greetings in local papers. But instead of identifying Lee with the flag of Taiwan`s exiled Republic of China, the ads featured the flag of its bitter rival - the communist People`s Republic of China. "It was a mistake, the Honduras government has apologised and corrected the situation," Taiwan government spokesman David Lee told Taiwan state television in Tegucigalpa. The apparently inadvertent error was widely reported in Taiwan media on Thursday. The Nationalist Republic of China fled into refuge on Taiwan after losing a civil war to communist troops in 1949 on the Chinese mainland. Since then, the two Chinas have waged a bitter ideological rivalry, with the mainland under socialism and Taiwan evolving from Nationalist authoritarianism into a vibrant democracy. Lee was in Honduras on a four-country Latin American tour designed to boost Taiwan`s international standing and break free of a diplomatic embargo enforced by Beijing, which regards the island as a renegade province. Honduras is one of only 30 states that recognise the exiled government in Taipei instead of Beijing.