Every flag is an argument someone won. A Nepali constitution explains how to draw one with a compass; a Cypriot art teacher found colors that neither Greece nor Turkey could claim; a fourteen-year-old shared a national competition with four strangers. These stories are about the cloth, the symbols stitched into it, and the people who decided what a country would look like from a distance.
Every tile in a Flags of the World game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
The Flags
nine stories
1The flag you build with a compass, in 24 steps
On the tile: Nepal1962
Nepal's constitution does not state its flag's proportions. Schedule 1 gives instructions instead: 24 numbered steps that start with a line drawn across a crimson cloth and end with a twelve-rayed sun, a crescent moon and a deep blue border. Follow them with a compass and a straightedge and the shape appears on its own. Every other country flies a rectangle; Nepal flies two stacked pennants.
A national flag is usually a little wider than it is tall. Qatar's official proportions are 11 by 28, more than twice as long as it is high, and Guinness World Records lists it as the longest national flag by official aspect ratio. Maroon covers most of that length; a broad white band sits against the mast, and the two colors meet along a row of nine white triangles. Flag makers have to cut the cloth to a shape no other country asks for.
Most countries lower the flag to half-mast to mark a death. Saudi Arabia does not. Its green flag carries the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith, written in Arabic script above a sword, and the thirteenth article of the Kingdom's flag law states that no Saudi flag bearing the shahada or a verse of the Quran may be flown at half-mast. The words outrank the mourning.
The Philippine flag has a blue stripe and a red one, and which sits on top is not a matter of taste. The Flag and Heraldic Code of the Philippines, passed in 1998, directs that the blue field be uppermost in time of peace and the red field uppermost in time of war. Hung vertically rather than flown, the same rule becomes a matter of left and right. The cloth does the announcing.
Liechtenstein and Haiti flew the same flag for years without knowing it: two horizontal bands, blue over red, which Liechtenstein's constitution made official in October 1921. The match came to light in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics, where Liechtenstein was making its Summer Games debut. The principality settled the confusion the following year by adding a gold crown in the upper hoist corner, adopted on June 24, 1937. Unveiling it, Prime Minister Josef Hoop said the crown stood for the united heart and spirit of the country, its people and its princely house.
The story goes that on June 15, 1219, with a Danish army faltering in battle on the Baltic coast, a red banner with a white cross drifted down from the clouds and turned the day. Denmark's own national site notes that although the campaign was real, the falling flag was not. What is documented is older than any other: Guinness World Records lists the Dannebrog as the oldest continuously used national flag.
Turn Paraguay's flag around and the picture changes. The front carries the national coat of arms, a gold star inside a wreath. The back carries the seal of the treasury: a lion seated beneath a liberty cap on a staff, ringed by the motto for peace and justice. The arrangement dates to the flag confirmed in November 1842, and it leaves Paraguay with a front and a back that do not match.
Most national emblems show animals, stars or crowns. Belize's shows two men. On the white disk at the center of the flag, a woodcutter with an axe over his shoulder and another with a paddle support a shield, and a mahogany tree rises behind them. The motto beneath says, in Latin, that under the shade I flourish. The country took the timber trade that once ruled it and made it the picture of itself.
Bhutan calls itself Druk Yul, the land of the thunder dragon, and the dragon lies along the diagonal of its flag, white, gripping jewels that stand for the land's wealth and perfection. The upper yellow half stands for the secular authority of the king, the orange half for Buddhist practice. Mayum Choying Wangmo Dorji designed the first version in 1947. Later changes made the flag a rectangle, turned the lower half orange, and set the dragon along the divide so it would not face the ground when the cloth hung limp.
The blue globe on Brazil's flag is not decoration. It is the sky over Rio de Janeiro on the morning of November 15, 1889, the day the republic was proclaimed, drawn as the celestial sphere seen from outside. Twenty-seven stars stand for the states and the federal district. Sigma Octantis marks Brasilia because it holds still while the rest of the sky turns. The motto across the band asks for order and progress.
The story goes that the Mexica left their homeland at the direction of their god Huitzilopochtli and were told to build where they found an eagle perched on a cactus, eating a snake. They saw exactly that on an island in Lake Texcoco and founded Tenochtitlan there, around 1325. Mexico City was later built on the ruins. The scene still sits at the center of Mexico's flag, a founding legend carried on cloth.
South Korea's flag reads as a diagram. The government's own explanation gives the white field to brightness, purity and peace, and the red and blue circle to the balance of opposing cosmic forces. The four groups of black bars at the corners are trigrams from an old system of signs: one for the sky, one for the earth, one for water, one for fire. Four ideas at the corners, and not a single word on the flag.
Behind the shield on Portugal's flag sits a golden armillary sphere, a nest of rings that models the movement of the heavens around a small Earth. A commission appointed in October 1910 proposed it as the eternal standard of the country's adventurous spirit. The National Constituent Assembly decreed the design on June 19, 1911, specifying the sphere in yellow with black bordering, centered on the line between green and scarlet. An astronomical model, not a crown or a saint, became the emblem of the new republic.
The first record of a Dutch flag is from 1572, and its top stripe was orange, for the princely house of Orange. During the seventeenth century the orange was gradually replaced by red. The Royal House repeats the common explanation, that orange shows up less well at sea, without claiming it as settled. The question stayed open for centuries until 1937, when Queen Wilhelmina fixed the colors by decree: bright vermilion, white and cobalt blue.
The sign had to be simple, recognizable at a distance and the same for friend and foe. On October 26, 1863, an international conference in Geneva, with delegates from fourteen governments, adopted a red cross on a white ground. The International Committee of the Red Cross explains that the emblem was formed by reversing the colors of the Swiss flag; Switzerland's permanent neutrality had been confirmed by treaty in 1815. The first Geneva Convention, adopted the next August, made it the single distinctive emblem.
Pierre de Coubertin drew the five interlocking rings at the top of a letter in 1913 and explained them in the Revue Olympique that August: five rings for the parts of the world won over to Olympism, and six colors, counting the white ground, that together reproduced the colors of every country. War delayed the flag's debut. It first rose in an Olympic stadium at the Antwerp Games in 1920.
A golden lion holding a ceremonial sword fills the dark red panel of Sri Lanka's flag, and the eight curls in the lion's tail stand for the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism. Each corner of that panel carries a leaf of the bo tree, for loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. The two bands at the hoist, green and orange, stand for the island's Muslim and Tamil communities. The leaves arrived in 1972, replacing the pinnacles of a Buddhist shrine at each corner.
Green, yellow and red flew over Ethiopia as separate pennants long before the country had a single flag. Emperor Menelik II established the first official one in 1897, and it carried the first letter of his name, in Amharic script, on the yellow stripe. The three colors traveled well beyond Ethiopia. As African colonies became countries, flag after flag reached for them, and they are now called the pan-African colors; Ghana's flag, adopted in 1957, was the second in Africa to carry them.
In 1927 the American Legion asked Alaska's schoolchildren, grades seven through twelve, to design a flag for the territory. The judges chose eight gold stars on blue, sent in by a seventh grader at the Territorial School in Seward named Benny Benson. Blue was for the Alaska sky and the forget-me-not, the North Star for Alaska's future, the Big Dipper for strength. For decades the state said he was thirteen; in 2022 researchers established he was fourteen.
Australia's federal flag competition of 1901 drew 32,823 entries from men, women and children. Five were so nearly identical that the judges declared all five designers winners and divided the prize. Each received forty pounds. Among them was Ivor Evans, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy from Melbourne; the others were an apprentice optician, a Melbourne architect, an artist from Perth and a ship's officer from Auckland. The flag first flew that September.
In 1971 a committee preparing Papua New Guinea's national symbols asked the country for a flag, and hundreds of entries arrived from people and schools. The winner came from Susan Karike, a fifteen-year-old at the Catholic mission school on Yule Island, drawn on a page of her school exercise book: black and red panels, the Southern Cross in white, a bird of paradise in gold. It was the national flag when independence came four years later. A prime minister later called it one of the symbols that binds the country together.
South Africa's flag came from Frederick Brownell, the state herald, who was told on a Saturday night that he had one week to produce a design. The Transitional Executive Council adopted it on March 15, 1994, and the proclamation followed on April 20, seven days before the country's first democratic election. The flag was introduced on April 27, election day, and flew at Nelson Mandela's inauguration on May 10. It was meant to be an interim flag. It is still flying.
In 1960 a twenty-year-old American wrote to Cheddi Jagan, British Guiana's former chief minister, to ask what the new country's flag would be. Jagan invited him to send ideas. Whitney Smith drew a golden arrowhead, his mother stitched a prototype, and he mailed it off. Britain's College of Arms modified the design slightly before Guyana raised the flag at independence on May 26, 1966, but the arrowhead was his. Guyanese still call it the Golden Arrowhead.
When Cyprus became a republic in 1960, a competition sought a flag for a state meant to hold Greek and Turkish Cypriots together. The rules barred red and blue, the colors of Turkey and Greece, and barred the cross and the crescent. The winning design, an outline of the island in copper above two olive branches, came from Ismet Guney, a Turkish Cypriot art teacher. He also drew the republic's coat of arms and its first currency.
On March 23, 1964, George Stanley, dean of arts at the Royal Military College in Kingston, wrote to his friend John Matheson, a member of Canada's all-party flag committee. At the bottom of the letter he sketched a small rectangle in red ink: red bars at the sides, one maple leaf in the middle. The committee chose that concept in October. The flag rose on Parliament Hill on February 15, 1965.
New Zealand put its flag to a vote. A silver fern design by Kyle Lockwood won a first referendum in 2015, beating his own red variant by 15,324 votes, and went up against the existing flag in March 2016. More than 2.1 million people voted, a turnout of 67.3 percent. The result was 56.7 percent for no change and 43.3 percent for the fern. New Zealand kept the flag it had, and the fern went back in the drawer.
Emilio Aguinaldo was in exile in Hong Kong in 1898 when he asked Marcela Agoncillo, known for her needlework, to sew a flag from his design. She bought silk from a shop in the city and worked with her seven-year-old daughter Lorenza and a family friend, Delfina Herbosa de Natividad, a niece of Jose Rizal. They started over whenever the sun's rays came out askew, and finished in five days. The flag was first unfurled on May 28 after a victory at Alapan, two weeks before it was shown at Kawit.
The story goes that a Philadelphia seamstress sewed the first Stars and Stripes for George Washington. It reached the public in 1870, when Betsy Ross's grandson William Canby described it to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Canby had been eleven when his grandmother died, and he could find no documents outside his own family. Pennsylvania's own records do show an order paying Elizabeth Ross for making ship's colors in May 1777, so she was certainly a flagmaker. The rest rests on family memory.
In 1780 Francis Hopkinson sent the Board of Admiralty a bill for designs he had made for the new United States: the flag, the Great Seal, board seals and devices for bills of exchange. For his trouble he asked for a quarter cask of the public wine. The invoice was rejected for lacking vouchers, and when Congress looked into it, it found he had been on the public payroll and was not solely responsible for the designs.
A favorite American story says an Ohio teenager sewed the 50-star flag for a school assignment, got a B-minus, and had the grade raised when Washington adopted his design. Robert Heft did make such a flag. But thousands of citizens sent in suggestions, a committee Eisenhower appointed recommended the staggered rows, and the Eisenhower Presidential Library holds other submissions with the same arrangement. There was never a formal competition.
A widely repeated rule says the British flag is the Union Jack only at sea, and the Union Flag everywhere else. The Flag Institute, an independent British flag charity, says that is wrong. From the seventeenth century the Admiralty used both names interchangeably, whatever the setting. An Admiralty circular in 1902 declared either name official, and in 1908 Parliament confirmed that the Union Jack should be regarded as the national flag.
The flag Apollo 11 planted was an ordinary three-by-five-foot nylon flag with one change: a hem along the top edge so a metal rod could slide through. Nothing on the Moon would make cloth wave, so the rod held it out and made it appear to be flying. NASA notes that Buzz Aldrin said he glimpsed the flag getting knocked over as the lunar module lifted off for home.
The Hinomaru, a red disk on white, got its first official recognition in February 1870, when the new Meiji government issued a proclamation. That proclamation covered Japanese merchant ships, not the country. For the next century and a quarter Japan flew the flag everywhere without a law saying it was the national flag. The Act on National Flag and Anthem finally said so in August 1999, more than 129 years later.
Flags usually change when governments do. Mauritania changed its flag by ballot. On August 5, 2017, voters were asked to approve, among other things, two red bands across the top and bottom of the green flag with its gold crescent and star. The bands were described as standing for the sacrifices made to defend the country. Eighty-six percent of those voting said yes, and the new flag was flying before the year was out.
The study of flags had no name until an American teenager gave it one. In the late 1950s Whitney Smith joined the Latin vexillum, a Roman military standard, to the Greek ending for a field of study and got vexillology. He was still in his teens. He founded the Flag Research Center in 1962, edited the field's main journal through 233 issues, and helped start its North American and international associations.
The United Nations emblem was drawn by a design team at the 1945 conference in San Francisco, led by Oliver Lincoln Lundquist. It shows the world from directly above the North Pole, held in two olive branches. The United Nations says the color was picked at the same time, blue for peace against red for war. The General Assembly made the emblem on a light blue ground the official flag in October 1947.