The history and design of the world’s flags, written up at length.
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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...
Three flags, three circles. A red disc on white. A red disc on green. A white disc on blue and red. No eagles, no crossed swords, no coats of arms. Ye...
Of the roughly 195 sovereign flags on Earth, fewer than a dozen feature a true diagonal band. The overwhelming majority speak the same visual language...
Saudi Arabia's flag is one you cannot fly upside down. Flip it and you invert the Shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith, which would be blasphemy....
More than 30 sovereign nations fly a tricolor today. Vertical or horizontal, three bands of solid color, no emblem required. It is the single most rep...
Line up the flags of Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iraq. Pan-Arab stripes. Crescents. Eagles. Quranic script. The visual grammar is consiste...
Greenland is the world's largest island, 836,330 square miles of ice, rock, and tundra, and for most of its modern history it has been politically inv...
Picture a soldier on a muddy battlefield hoisting a white cloth above his head. Everyone knows what that means. Now picture a nation raising a white-d...
In 2008, Bhutan did something no one expected. The kingdom drafted a brand-new constitution, held its first parliamentary elections, and transitioned ...
Ask five people from five different countries what green means on a flag and you will get five different answers, each delivered with total confidence...
Sri Lanka has no wild lions. It never did. No fossil record, no cave paintings, no ecological niche for a big cat of that kind on a tropical island in...
Strip the color from the flags of Argentina, Uruguay, and Bangladesh and you get the same thing three times: a circle, centered, radiating meaning. Th...
At the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, stadium staff faced a problem nobody had written a manual for. A Saudi Arabian fan's flag slips off the railing a...
In the summer of 1964, the Canadian Parliament descended into what one senator later called "the most bitter debate in Canadian legislative history." ...
Imagine your entire country scattered across 900,000 square miles of open ocean, an area larger than Western Europe, with a total landmass of less tha...