The history and design of the world’s flags, written up at length.
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Hand someone a blank rectangle and ask them to design a flag, and nine times out of ten they will reach for horizontal or vertical stripes. That is th...
On June 15, 1219, according to Danish legend, a red banner bearing a white cross fell from the sky during the Battle of Lyndanisse in modern-day Eston...
When Barbados unveiled its national flag on November 30, 1966, the very day it gained independence from Britain, the design contained an act of defian...
Of the 193 UN member states, fewer than a dozen place a plant as the central or dominant symbol on their national flag. Stars, stripes, crescents, cro...
In 2014 a Malaysian flag was accidentally flown upside down at a Southeast Asian sporting event, which turned it into the flag of Indonesia. Social me...
The Bauhinia blakeanae, the flower at the center of Hong Kong's flag, is a sterile hybrid. Discovered around 1880 near the ruins of a house on the sho...
Of the 193 sovereign nations recognized by the United Nations in 2026, exactly two have a serrated zigzag border between their color fields: Bahrain a...
Vatican City is a sovereign state of 44 hectares, smaller than a lot of golf courses, with a population of roughly 800. Over it flies a square gold an...
Hand someone a blank sheet of paper and ask them to draw the flag of Japan. They'll nail it in seconds: a red circle on white. Now ask them to draw th...
On the morning of October 21, 2010, government workers across Myanmar climbed flagpoles, ladders, and rooftops to haul down the flag that had flown ov...
If you laid every national flag in the world side by side, green would appear on more than half of them. But in a specific band of countries stretchin...
Place the flags of Israel, Uzbekistan, the Åland Islands, Curaçao, and Djibouti side by side and they look like a family. Blue and white, clean and co...
In 1985, Greenland's parliament faced a simple question with enormous political weight: what should the flag of the world's largest island look like? ...
In 1902, Cuba raised its new national flag for the first time over a sovereign nation. At its center: a single white star on a red triangle. Thousands...
On 12 June 1898, in Kawit, Cavite, Emilio Aguinaldo stepped onto the balcony of his ancestral home and unfurled a new flag to declare Philippine indep...
You are designing a national flag from scratch. Where do you put the most important symbol? Almost every instinct, and most design textbooks, says cen...
Run through every national flag in your head. All 197 sovereign states, plus dozens of sub-national territories. Stars, stripes, crescents, crosses, e...
In August 1962, as the Union Jack came down for the last time over Kingston, Jamaica became the first Caribbean nation to gain independence from Brita...
In 2026, at least four sovereign nations display a sword or dagger on their national flag. Saudi Arabia's white saif gleams beneath the shahada. Oman'...
If you examine the flags of the world's 193 sovereign nations, only one displays a foreign military decoration. In the upper-left canton of Malta's fl...
In November 1975, three rival governments declared independence from Portugal on the same day. Each flew a different flag. Each claimed to represent t...
Somewhere in the vaults of the Museo Histórico Nacional in Buenos Aires hangs a faded silk banner carried through the streets during the May Revolutio...
Lay the flags of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland side by side and squint, and you see the same flag five times. An off-center cross stret...
In 2019, when the French women's handball team from Guadeloupe competed in international qualifiers, spectators in the stands waved a green flag embla...