Bangladesh Flag

How to identify it

A bottle-green field with a single red disc set slightly left of centre. On a still flag, there is visibly more green between the disc and the right edge than between the disc and the left edge.

Design and construction

Proportions

10:6 (length to width) as written in the Flag Rules

Adoption and legal status

17 January 1972, when the Flag Rules replaced the 1971 flag that carried a yellow map

Construction

The Flag Rules give the disc a radius of one fifth of the flag length and place its centre on the perpendicular drawn at nine twentieths of the length, on the horizontal centre line. The dyes are named in the rules as Procion Brilliant Green H-2RS and Procion Brilliant Orange H-2RS.

Officially documented meaning

The Flag Rules specify geometry and dye references only; they attach no symbolic meaning to the green field or the red disc.

Commonly repeated interpretation

Not official: The disc is widely read as a sun rising over Bengal, or as the blood of those killed in the 1971 war, and the green as the land. These readings are common in teaching material rather than in the rules themselves.

History of the design

The flag first raised in 1971 placed a golden map of the country inside the red disc. The map was dropped when the Flag Rules were issued in January 1972, partly because it could not be drawn correctly on the reverse side.

Similar flags

Compare the details that separate these designs.

• 
  Japan

  Japan places its red disc exactly in the centre of a white field, not off-centre on green.

• 
  Palau

  Palau is sky blue with a yellow-gold disc; the off-centring is the same idea, the colours are not.

Comparison guides

• Japan vs Bangladesh vs Palau: telling the three disc flags apart

Sources