Flag of Nepal

How to read it

Article 8 of the Constitution of Nepal (2015) describes two triangles one above the other, with a crimson ground and deep blue borders, a white crescent moon showing eight of its sixteen rays in the upper part and a white sun of twelve rays in the lower part. Its Schedule 1 sets out how to draw the flag as a geometric construction, from a single line AB drawn along the bottom of a crimson cloth. The border, the same width on every side, is deep blue, and the guide lines and circles of the construction are not shown on the flag. Store norske leksikon dates the present form to 16 December 1962, when King Mahendra had the engineer Shankar Nath Rimal draw it: it kept the shape and the emblems of two hundred years of flags and took the faces off the sun and moon.

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How the constitution draws it

Schedule 1 starts from the base line AB. The side at the pole, AC, is AB plus a third of AB, so the shape is taller than it is wide. A point D on that side, as high as AB is long, is joined to B to make the lower pennant, and a line across from the point E on BD, AB along from B, makes the base of the upper one, whose tip is joined back to C. The moon and the sun are centred on a line a quarter of the way along AB; the moon has eight equal triangles as rays and the sun twelve. The blue border is as wide as a short distance in the construction called TN.

Where the shape comes from

The historian Daya Ram Shrestha traces the double pennant to the Lichchhavi king Mandev, about 1,500 years ago, who took a Vedic emblem as his flag, the Nepali Times reported in 2002. The present flag dates from the unification of Nepal under Prithvi Narayan Shah, when the border was green rather than blue. It was flown at the United Nations when Nepal joined in December 1955, and the 1963 constitution gave it official status. Store norske leksikon says triangular flags were once common across South Asia, because they unfurl even in a light wind and are easy to see from far away. The Nepali Times adds that the triangles stand for shakti, power, and that by law the flags on government buildings are replaced every Dasain and Chaite Dasain.

A wrongly drawn flag is an official matter

In May 2018 Nepal’s Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration asked four officials to explain how a wrongly shaped flag came to be put up at the Janaki temple during a visit by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, The Kathmandu Post reported. The ministry pointed out that the annex of the constitution sets out the flag’s size and shape.