Articles

National flags get the famous dragons: Bhutan's thunder dragon, the red dragon of Wales. But the dragon's steadiest employment has always been municip...

Most independence flags are new inventions. Ceylon's was a restoration. When the island became independent in 1948, it did not commission a fresh desi...

Before there was Thailand, there was Siam, and before Thailand's familiar red, white, and blue stripes, there was one of the most beloved designs in f...

Grenada's flag holds a national record almost nobody notices: it is the only national flag in the world with a nutmeg on it. But the question people a...

Every country has a flag. Almost every country also has a second, less famous symbol: the national emblem, the device that appears on passports, coins...

Search the flags of every country, territory, and dependency on Earth and you will find lions, eagles, dragons, swords, castles, and one sinking ship....

Nauru covers 21 km². Central Park covers about 3.4 km², so the island wins that comparison, but only just, and only because Central Park is a park. On...

Among the world's 195 national flags, the tricolor dominates. Three stripes, three colors, three ideas collapsed into one tidy rectangle. France, Germ...

In July 2024 in Paris, South Korean athletes and officials filed a formal protest over spectators waving Japan's Imperial Rising Sun flag in the Olymp...

Of the 193 UN-recognized national flags flying in 2026, Jamaica's is the only one that contains neither red, white, nor blue. Those three colors domin...

Picture a flag that works like a legal brief. A gold silhouette of a country's own territory, hovering above six white stars on a blue field. It looks...

Picture a schoolchild asked to draw the flag of Moldova. She gets the three vertical stripes right: blue, yellow, red. Then she freezes. In the centre...

May 18, 1803, at Arcahaie on the western coast of Saint-Domingue. According to the legend every Haitian schoolchild knows, a young woman named Catheri...

Of the roughly 2,000 square miles of cedar forest that once covered Lebanon's mountains in antiquity, fewer than 12 square miles survive today. That i...

You've seen it a thousand times. The circle of twelve gold stars on a blue field, hanging outside embassies, courthouses and passport offices from Lis...

In 2026, nations photograph their own borders from orbit. They render coastlines in photorealistic 3D. They simulate entire economies on supercomputer...

Lay out the flags of a dozen Caribbean nations and territories side by side and a visitor from another planet might reasonably conclude that a single ...

Stand in a government hall in Asunción during a ceremony, look at the flag behind the podium, then walk around to the other side of the room. The embl...

Open a map of the Arabian Gulf and look at the flags fluttering over Manama and Doha. At first glance, they seem almost embarrassingly similar. Bold f...

Line up the flags of Argentina, Bangladesh, Taiwan, and Uruguay. You'll see a sun, or something sun-like, on every single one. And not one of them is ...

March 6, 1957, Accra. A new flag climbs a pole for the first time over a country that has existed for a matter of hours. The cloth is red, gold, and g...

One national flag shows a living animal drawn in near-photorealistic detail, centered on a field of green, ringed by ten stars, crossed by three color...

Belarus is the only country in the world that held a democratic vote to erase its own democracy's symbol. In 1995, four years after the Soviet Union c...

Line up the world's nearly 200 national flags and the structural sameness jumps out. Horizontal bands stacked like sediment. Vertical tricolours stand...

Place the flags of Vietnam and Spain side by side and ask someone who knows nothing about either country which belongs to a communist republic and whi...

Of the roughly 200 sovereign and semi-sovereign flags on Earth, six share an almost identical structure, and all six come from the same cold corner of...

Spend an afternoon travelling around Europe and you can collect the same bird four times over. In Podgorica it flies above a government ministry on Mo...

Line up every national flag in the world and squint. You'll see the same shapes repeating like a visual stutter: eagles, lions, stars, crescents, cros...

Imagine a national flag with nothing on it. No eagle, no star, no cross, no stripes. A single, unbroken field of color. Most people would assume it wa...

You could stare at Tuvalu's flag for years and never realize you're looking at a map. Nine gold stars on a sky-blue field, scattered in what seems lik...

Most national flags that feature a sun keep things simple. Japan gives you a red disc. Bangladesh does something similar. Laos offers a clean white ci...

Picture the simplest flags on Earth. Japan's red disc on white. Libya's old plain green field. Ukraine's two horizontal bars of blue and yellow. Now p...

Out of 195 widely recognized sovereign nations, exactly two put a map of their own territory on their national flag: Cyprus and Kosovo. A flag normall...

A Bhutanese government official holds a freshly printed flag up to the light, counts the claws on the dragon, and sends the whole batch back to the pr...

Picture a room. A long room, walls lined with the flags of every nation on earth. You scan left to right: eagles, stars, crescents, suns, a dragon, an...

Blue appears on roughly 40% of the world's national flags. Island and coastal nations, the countries most surrounded by ocean, cluster around blue at ...

Picture the flags of Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso laid side by side. Six nations thousands of miles apart, shaped by diffe...

In October 2018, South Korea made a straightforward request: remove the Rising Sun flag from your warships before entering Jeju Island for an internat...

Chad and Romania have been flying virtually identical flags since 1989. Two nations on separate continents, with no shared history, culture, or langua...