Tonga Flew a Red Cross Before the Red Cross Did
Julio Song · · 8 min read
In 1862 the Kingdom of Tonga raised a white flag with a red cross on it. The next year, a conference of delegates in Geneva picked the same design as the sign of a new humanitarian movement. One of the two had to move, and it wasn't Geneva.
So Tonga shifted its cross into a corner, filled the rest of the cloth with red, and in 1875 wrote a promise into its constitution: this flag "shall never be altered." It hasn't been. The Red Cross emblem, meanwhile, has picked up three companions since then.
The design you see on Tonga's flag today is a workaround, and the workaround is now protected by the constitution.
A king, a missionary and a cross
The story starts with Tāufaʻāhau, who began his reign as King George Tupou I on 4 December 1845. He spent the next decades turning a group of rival chiefdoms into a single state. An assembly of chiefs he first called in 1859 produced a law code issued in 1862.
The flag belongs to that same year of state-building. According to the Flags of the World record for Tonga, the king called for flag designs at the first assembly of the Tongan parliament in 1862. The result was "a plain white flag with a red couped cross." A couped cross is one whose arms stop short of the edges of the flag, so it floats on the field like a plus sign.
Before this, Tonga had flown something busier. The earliest Tongan flag was white with a cross in each corner and the letters A and M in the centre, one red and one blue.
The new design carried a clear religious message, and the king said so himself. Flag historian Whitney Smith recorded his words, quoted in translation on FOTW: "It is my wish that our flag contains the cross of Jesus and that the flag is of red colour to bring to expression the blood which was shed on the cross for our redemption."
Who drew it? Smith named Prince Uelingatoni Ngu Tupoumalohi as the chief designer. The king also worked on it with Shirley Waldemar Baker, a Methodist minister who later became Tonga's prime minister. FOTW credits the flag and the coat of arms to the prince and Baker together.
Geneva picks the same design
While Tonga settled on its flag, a group in Switzerland was working on a different problem. How do you stop soldiers from shooting the people who come onto a battlefield to treat the wounded?
Their answer came at a conference held in Geneva from 26 to 29 October 1863. Its resolutions said volunteer medics "shall wear in all countries, as a uniform distinctive sign, a white armlet with a red cross."
Governments made it law the next year. Article 7 of the Geneva Convention signed on 22 August 1864 says: "The flag and the arm-badge shall bear a red cross on a white ground." Hospitals and ambulances were to fly it, always next to their national flag.
Where did the design come from? The 1906 revision of the convention gave an official answer. Article 18 describes the emblem as formed by reversing the Swiss federal colours, kept out of respect to Switzerland. Historians aren't all convinced. Pierre Boissier, a jurist and Red Cross historian, found no clear evidence for that origin story.
Either way, the result was a white field with a red cross in the middle. That was, give or take a proportion, the flag Tonga had raised in 1862.
Moving the cross into the corner
Think about what that overlap meant in practice. A white flag with a red cross was now an internationally protected sign. It marked people and buildings an army must not attack. A kingdom flying the same pattern over its ships and forts was asking for confusion.
The FOTW record says the 1862 design "was later found to be too similar to the International Red Cross Flag, adopted in 1863." Tonga's fix was neat. It kept the white flag with its red cross whole, shrank it, and placed it in the canton of a red flag. In 1866, King George Tupou I decreed that version as Tonga's flag.
Look at the modern flag and you'll see the 1862 original sitting in the top left corner, intact. Tonga didn't throw away its first design. It framed it.
The red field also did the job the king asked for. His stated wish was a red flag for the blood of the cross. The 1866 layout gave him far more red than the 1862 version ever had.
"Shall never be altered"
Nine years later the king put the flag beyond ordinary politics. On 4 November 1875 George Tupou I granted Tonga a written constitution. Amended many times, it is still in force.
Clause 47 is short. Here it is in full, from the current consolidated text:
The Flag of Tonga (the flag of King George) shall never be altered but shall always be the flag of this Kingdom and the present Royal Ensign shall always be the ensign of the Royal Family of Tonga.
Notice the label in brackets. The constitution calls it "the flag of King George," tying the design to one man. It also locks in a second flag, the Royal Ensign, which belongs to the royal family.
The wording reads like a royal decree, because the whole constitution began as one. The preamble says the King "granted" it.
One legal detail is worth knowing. Clause 79 sets out how the constitution gets amended, and it names the parts nobody is allowed to touch: the law of liberty, the succession to the throne, and the titles and estates of the nobles. The flag isn't on that list. So clause 47 forbids change in plain words, but the amendment clause doesn't shield it the way it shields the throne.
What would changing it take? Under clause 79, an amendment has to pass the Legislative Assembly three times. Then the King and the Cabinet must agree unanimously before the King signs it. Nobody has tried that for the flag.
Tonga added a second layer of protection in 1962. The Tonga Royal Arms and Flag Act, summarised on FOTW, was "An Act to Prevent the Unauthorized Use of the Tonga Coat of Arms and the Royal Ensign." It says the Royal Ensign "shall not be flown or otherwise displayed except when His Majesty is present."
The protected state that kept its colours
The flag outlived its king. George Tupou I died in February 1893, aged 95. Seven years later, Britain arrived with a treaty.
A Treaty of Friendship signed on 18 May 1900 made Tonga a British protected state. Britain ran its foreign affairs until 4 June 1970. No Union Jack went into the canton.
Tonga's canton kept its cross. The kingdom never gave up its sovereignty to a foreign power during those seventy years, and the flag set down in 1875 is still the flag today. A design the constitution says "shall never be altered" is a hard thing for a protecting power to swap out.
The emblem that kept changing
Tonga moved out of the way of the Red Cross emblem in the 1860s and then froze. The emblem it made way for did not stay frozen at all.
During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878, the Ottoman Empire used a red crescent instead of the cross. The Geneva Conventions formally recognised the Red Crescent, along with Persia's Red Lion and Sun, in 1929.
Then in December 2005 a Third Protocol added the Red Crystal, a red frame shaped like a square on edge, adopted as a neutral symbol. It passed with 98 votes in favour, 27 against and 10 abstentions, and came into force on 14 January 2007.
So since 1866 the humanitarian emblem has added a crescent, a lion and sun, and a crystal, while Tonga's flag hasn't changed a stitch. The kingdom that gave way in the 1860s ended up with the more stable design of the two.
How to read Tonga's flag now
Next time you see Tonga's flag, read it as two flags stacked together. The white canton with its red cross is the 1862 original, the one Geneva crowded out. The red field around it is the 1866 answer to that problem. And the whole arrangement is the 1875 text, fixed in law.
A few things help you spot it correctly:
- The cross in Tonga's canton is couped. Its arms stop short of the white rectangle's edges, so it never touches the red.
- The flag is usually drawn at a ratio of 1:2, long and low like a British ensign.
- The cross sits in the canton, never in the centre. A centred red cross on white is the Red Cross emblem, and Geneva Convention signatories must restrict its use.
That last point matters if you design anything with flags. National laws in Britain, the United States, Canada and elsewhere restrict use of the Red Cross emblem. Tonga worked that out in the 1860s, decades before any of those laws.
On 4 November 2025, Tonga marked 150 years of its constitution. At a groundbreaking for a new parliament building in Nukuʻalofa, King Tupou VI told the crowd: "I only wish that we can continue to defend the Constitution of 1875." Clause 47 is part of what he means. The flag over that ceremony was the same one George Tupou I decreed in 1866, with his first design still sitting in the corner.
Julio Song
Writer
Julio is a staff writer at FlagDB. He studied Mathematics at the University of Madrid and has a passion for vexillology.
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