Flag of Laos

How to read it

Article 112 of the constitution of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (as revised in 2015) describes the national flag as dark blue with red edges and a white moon in the middle. The flag is two thirds as high as it is long, each red band is half as high as the blue band, and the moon is four fifths of the blue band’s height across: so the bands are in the proportions 1:2:1, and the disc is two fifths of the flag’s height. The same flag is used for all purposes, state, civil and military, Store norske leksikon (SNL) notes. It was first adopted on 12 October 1945 by the short-lived government formed after Japan’s defeat, which broke up when French forces returned in 1946, and was officially reinstated as the national flag on 2 December 1975, when the Pathet Lao took power and founded the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.

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The moon, the sky and the blood

The Lao News Agency (KPL), in an article of December 2016 drawn from the constitution and from a book on the flag by Tham Xaiyasith Sena, says the white disc is not an ordinary circle but the full moon of the fifteenth day of the waxing moon. The white also stands for purity and honesty. The rim of the circle, the article says, gathers the strength of the nation’s unity into one, as in the Lao saying “united, the Lao live; divided, the Lao die”. Another reading the article gives ties the moon to the name of the capital, Vientiane, “the city of the moon”.

The dark blue, according to the same article, comes from the sky, which stands above everything in the world, and stands for the nation’s supreme sovereignty; other readings it gives are the higher path of the Buddha’s teaching and an abundance of crops. The red comes from revolutionary courage and from patriotic blood shed on Lao soil, and the two red bands guard the blue that holds the moon.

The first flag

Laopedia, the Lao government’s online encyclopedia, says the first flag was sewn in Vientiane by a seamstress, Aunt Khamchan, to the directions and plan of Tham Xaiyasith Sena, who chaired a committee of the Lao Issara (Free Lao) independence movement. Before 1975 the kingdom’s flag was red with a three-headed white elephant, SNL notes.

Telling it from Cambodia’s flag

Cambodia’s flag has the same 1:2:1 bands with the colours the other way round, blue at the top and bottom and red in the middle, and a white temple, Angkor Wat, in place of the disc.