Flag of Thailand

How to read it

The Flag Act of 1979 (B.E. 2522) sets the national flag as a rectangle 6 parts high and 9 long, divided along its length into five stripes: dark blue in the middle, 2 parts deep, a white stripe of 1 part on each side of it, and a red stripe of 1 part at the top and the bottom. It also calls the flag the Thong Trairong, “tricolour flag”. King Vajiravudh gave the tricolour as the national flag on 28 September 1917, replacing a red flag with a white elephant. An announcement of the Office of the Prime Minister in the Royal Gazette of 30 September 2017 set standard colour values for official flags, measured with a spectrophotometer from old flags in the National Museum, the Thai National Flag Museum and the Royal Thai Navy, Siam University’s library records.

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Why the elephant flag was replaced

In 1916, the Parliament Museum of Thailand writes, King Vajiravudh found that the national flag of the time looked no different from the government flag from a distance, and that the elephant in its centre was not dignified enough. He first ordered a flag of five red and white stripes. In 1917 the dark blue was added, because Siam had entered the First World War on the side of the Allies, most of whose flags had three colours. SNL names them: Britain, France, Russia and the United States.

How the meaning of the colours was settled

Siam University’s library describes two stages. King Vajiravudh gave the colours a meaning informally, in his poem on the emblem of the tricolour: red for blood given for the nation, white for the purity of the Buddha’s teaching, blue for the king’s own colour. Later King Prajadhipok (Rama VII) had a note on the national flag written, and the meanings it fixed are the ones used today: red for the nation (the people), white for religion, with no one religion meant, and blue for the king. The Nation, a Bangkok newspaper, reads the white as Buddhism, the faith of most Thais, and the flag as the country’s motto, “Nation, Religion, Monarchy”.

A flag day on 28 September

Since 2017, the flag’s centenary, 28 September has been Thai National Flag Day. It is not a public holiday; the flag is raised and displayed that day, Thai PBS reports from the Office of the Prime Minister.

Telling it from Costa Rica’s flag

Costa Rica’s flag has the same five stripes with red and blue swapped: blue at the top and bottom, white, and a red stripe twice as wide in the middle, as its flag law describes. Thailand’s middle stripe is blue and its outer stripes red.