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 flag history: a white elephant on a field of red. The flag of Siam is what people are usually looking for when they search for it, and its story ends with a legend about a flag flown upside down, a king who noticed, and a redesign that erased the elephant forever.
The Flag of Thailand
View Flag →A sea of red, again
Siam's flag story starts the way many do: with plain red cloth. Siamese ships in the 17th and 18th centuries flew simple red banners, which worked fine until international trade made it a problem; too many nations were flying the same thing. The solution arrived in stages, each one added by a king of the Chakri dynasty, which has ruled since 1782.
Rama I added a white chakra to the red field, the disc-like weapon of the god Vishnu and the namesake symbol of his new dynasty. Around 1817, Rama II placed a white elephant inside the chakra, marking the acquisition of several white elephants during his reign, an event of enormous significance in Siamese kingship.
The white elephant needs explaining, because the modern English idiom (a ruinously expensive gift) tells at most half the story, and the gift tale itself is poorly attested. In Siam the white elephant was the single most auspicious animal in the kingdom. Rare, sacred in both Hindu and Buddhist tradition, and by custom the property of the king, white elephants were an index of royal merit: the more a monarch possessed, the more cosmically legitimate his reign. Putting one on the flag was roughly equivalent to putting a halo on the state.
1855: the elephant stands alone
The formal, internationally recognized flag of Siam arrived under King Mongkut, Rama IV, the modernizing monarch later caricatured by the West in The King and I. Negotiating trade treaties with Britain and other powers in 1855, Siam needed a proper ensign that foreign ships could identify. Mongkut removed the chakra and left the white elephant alone on red.
For the next six decades, that was Siam: a serene white elephant, facing the hoist, on crimson. From 1893 the state and naval versions dressed the animal in full royal regalia. It was ornate, unmistakable, and, as a practical piece of cloth, doomed. The design was expensive to manufacture, impossible to sew accurately in remote provinces, and, worst of all, it had a right way up.
The upside-down elephant
The story of the elephant's downfall is one of vexillology's great legends. The story is usually dated to 1916, during a flood. Touring the provinces, King Vajiravudh, Rama VI, is said to have seen the national flag flying upside down, its sacred elephant helplessly on its back. A flag that could display the kingdom's holiest animal inverted, the king concluded, was a design flaw no amount of tradition could excuse.
How literally to take the anecdote is debated, as with most perfect flag stories; Thai court records even place the king in Bangkok on the date usually given for the sighting. What is certain is that the flag reform of 1916 split the flag in two. Ordinary citizens and merchant ships got a design that could not be flown wrong, five horizontal stripes, red-white-red-white-red, vertically symmetrical, while the state flag kept the elephant, now standing on a pedestal in full regalia. The Trairong of 1917 then replaced both, and the elephant, after a century on the flagpole, retired to naval ensigns and ceremonial use, where its descendants remain in Thailand today.
1917: why the middle stripe turned blue
The stripe flag flew for barely a year before its center stripe changed from red to blue, creating the Trairong, the tricolor, adopted on 28 September 1917 and unchanged since.
Two explanations for the blue coexist, and both are probably true. The first is personal and auspicious: in the Thai tradition that assigns a color to each day of the week, the deep indigo of the new stripe was the color for Saturday, the day Vajiravudh was born in 1881, making it the king's color. The stripes came to be read as nation (red), religion (white), and monarchy (blue), the trinity of Thai identity, though that gloss has never been made official. The diplomatic reading is that 1917 was the year Siam entered the First World War on the side of the Allies, and a red, white, and blue tricolor put Siam's flag in visual fellowship with Britain, France, the United States, and Russia. A flag that honored the king and flattered the Allies simultaneously was, by any standard, efficient design.
The Flag of France
View Flag →Siam becomes Thailand, the flag stays put
The country renamed itself Thailand in 1939 (with a brief reversion to Siam after the Second World War), but the Trairong sailed through unchanged. It has now outlasted the absolute monarchy that created it, a dozen constitutions, and more coups than any flag should have to witness. The elephant, meanwhile, never entirely left: it still appears on the Royal Thai Navy's ensign, and white elephants remain crown property in Thailand today.
So the flag of Siam, properly speaking, is two flags. Ask for it before 1916 and it is the white elephant on red, one of the most distinctive state symbols Asia ever produced. Ask after 1917 and it is simply the flag of Thailand under an older name. The elephant lost its job to a hoisting accident and a modernizing king, which is an undignified end for a sacred animal, but it earned a distinction few flag emblems can claim: people are still searching for it a century after it came down.